


Fear Not the Dark My Friend

by captainjackspearow



Category: Dark Souls (Video Games), Dark Souls III
Genre: And then they get married PROPERLY thanks FROMSOFT, Angst with a Happy Ending, Basically a fix it for the wedding where the ashen one carries anri's soul till the ending, Canon-Typical Bodily Mutilation i.e. crimes against firekeepers, Canon-Typical Gore, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Content warning for Aldrich's canonical levels of gross BS, Dissociation, F/F, Femslash, Fix-It, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Lord of Hollows Ending, Oral Sex, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Resurrect your Lesbians, Sharing a Body, Soul Bond, Usurpation of Fire, both of those are for ringed city chapter and deal with NPCs who die in canon, implied Firekeeper/Karla endgame, implied eygon/irina, mentions of Seath, passing enough that if that tag means nothing to you then you're gucci, passing references to Aldia's war crimes, references to Canon crimes of Gwyn and speculation on a couple more, spoilers for Ashes of Ariandel, subtle bloodborne references
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-01
Updated: 2019-08-05
Packaged: 2019-11-07 10:08:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 58,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17958497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainjackspearow/pseuds/captainjackspearow
Summary: As the Ashen One leaves, face still warm with affection, she could have sworn she saw the faintest shimmer amidst the eerie collection of statues. She smiles, and thinks it nothing more than the glimmer of snow in the wind.There is light in Irithyll after all, for so cold a place.(Later, Anri sees it too, but she’s still only clad in her mere tunic, her sword still by the altar where a wayward foot knocked it, and then she sees nothing at all.)---A fix-it for the Usurpation of Fire ending, where Yuria dupes them both but was telling the truth in a sense – the Ashen One binds her soul to Anri’s in the marriage and carries it along with her own through the rest of the journey, and it gives the both of them the strength to do what must be done. Sweet, with a certain Souls-appropriate amount of angst and gore, but with an ultimately happy ending.





	1. Chapter 1

_Our Lord and Liege, knowest thou of a maid named Anri?_

 

_She is known to me indeed. I find I owe her much aid, and intend to repay mine debt to her in time. We have become fast friends over the course of our respective journeys._

_She is hollow, much like thyself._

_And yet she too clings to her humanity, Yuria. I shall not give up on her yet, and neither shall she, before Aldrich’s cinders lie strewn upon his throne. She is far too strong-willed._

_Yes, and it is for that purpose I shall make this proposal to thee._

_What proposal dost thou speak of?_

_Knowest thou of wedlock? Of its purpose?_

_Very little. I must remind thee that I am a mere knight. I haven’t the schooling of-_

_-speak not of the assassin. It troubles me enough that thou woulds’t not rid us of him._

_He’s friendly enough, Yuria. I will not kill someone who’s given me no cause._

There’s a brief moment of silence but for the creak of steel joints echoing throughout the small tunnel beneath Firelink shrine. Eventually, the knight continues, the same note of firm irritation lingering in her voice.

 

_As you were saying?_

_Indeed, then. It is a contract of souls, a binding of the two, even, permitted only to those slated to produce something greater than themselves. It shall allow you to draw strength from each other, and in time, shall grant thee the necessary power to usher in the birth of a new kingdom, or thus Londor hopes._

_And what does this have to do with Anri?_

_A fellow of mine guides her at this moment. When the time is ripe, thou mayst make thy salutations. For what Lord taketh no spouse?_

 

_Thou would have me perform this strange ritual with Anri? Wherefore Anri?_

 

_It is as thou spoke. She has a strength similar to thine, though weaker by a part. Thy good deeds to come require such a strength. Besides, her presence does not seem objectionable to thee in the least._

 

_…_

 

_Be on thy way, then. And worry not too greatly about it._

_***_

Irithyll is cold and unforgiving beneath its picturesque appearance, but there’s a refreshing novelty to be found. Snow is altogether a new experience for her, she’s sure, even with little to nothing in the way of memories from her life before her first death. The way it dances across the colorful lights in the sky is enchanting. 

 

Even still, she barely has time to take in the vista before an impossible number of teeth sink in around her abdomen and she’s thrown against the stonework of the bridge. The gentle stinging of countless falling pinpricks is the last sensation she feels before returning to the ash.

 

Between the impossibly fast beasts and the whirling patrols of dancing knights, she’s cursing Sulyvhan’s name within hours. There’s a soft light ahead – not the unfamiliar glimmer of the colorful sky or the eerie dancing of enchanted light, but the warm glow of flickering flame, and she darts off towards the derelict church in hope of some salvation. She is pleasantly surprised to find not only a bonfire, already lit, but a familiar knight tending to the embers as well.

 

Still clad in full plate, Anri sits, poking half-heartedly at the sputtering flame with her sword. Her face is far messier than the Ashen One’s ever seen it – smeared with dirt and ichor, like she’s tried to wipe it clean and only made it worse in the process. Glancing down, sure enough, her tabard is damp in a streak of sweat and blood. Her resolute expression, gazing dejectedly into the fire, is enough cause to suspect she’s only confirmed what her friend informed her of even without the tell-tale musty scent of the underground lake.  She doesn’t even move, and it’s so unlike Anri, even jovial as she usually is, to have her back to _both_ entrances. There’s no possibility that she’s merely putting such faith in the flame to protect her. Not now.

 

Not after what became of Horace.

 

Yuria’s right. She can see it, the hollowing’s there, creeping in at the edges of her face. The dark streaks climb just behind her ears, and she so desperately wants to brush the stray strands of hair framing her face back to cover the winding marks.

Instead, she clears her throat and shoves the thought aside. _Anri? I am glad to see thee outside of Carthus._

The knight in question finally looks up, and even the flames in her eyes burn low – now mere embers, threatening nothingness. Her voice carries the heavy weight of resignation, though there is still Anri’s distinct brand of sincere enthusiasm underneath, even in spite of everything. It makes her heart stutter, just for a beat.

 

_Oh. I thought it might be thee. Good to see thee too._

The church echoes with the rough grinding of dirty plate, joints crusted over with the remnants of her own dried blood, as she sits beside Anri. It’s followed immediately by the clatter of her helmet against the stone of the church floor, and she shakes out her helmet hair, the sweaty locks eventually coming to rest against her cheeks before she brushes them back behind an ear.

 

Even as wretched as her friend looks, it is so, _so_ good to see a familiar face after slogging through the hellscape of Irithyll.

 

_It’s not like thee to sit thus unguarded._

 

Anri smiles softly to herself, before looking down at her hands.

 

_Perhaps. I’ve never lacked another to stand sentinel, though._

She remembers the sensation of Horace’s halberd piercing her lung, the sting of the hot, murky water splashing across the wound, and flushes with guilt as her mind’s eye flashes to his body, floating lifelessly in the muck.

 

He’d never said an unkind word to her in their brief acquaintance. He’d only grunted to her in the cave, same as always, and she hadn’t even expected him to be hollow at first, so the first sweep across her face took her entirely by surprise, and it was all over before she could even process, and-

 

There will be time for guilt later, when her friend isn’t so upset that she’s leaving her back open to any random hollow.

_He was dear to thee, was he not?_

_He was my oldest friend. I’ve known him since I was a child. After Aldrich destroyed the orphanage, it was just the two of us._

_I’m so sorry._

_Don’t be. I… I think perhaps it is better, now. At least he is at rest. I hate to think of him wandering down there… Alone in the dark. Neither of us are- were, I should say, much used to that._

_If thou dost not wish to speak of-_

The Ashen One pauses as Anri shakes her head.

 

_At least Aldrich didn’t take him from me too._

Her voice is laced with a bitter flame: purposeful, but painful to hear. There is a brief moment of silence, but for the fire crackling before the pair. Eventually Anri grumbles about being rid of her dirty armor, and a cacophony of clanks echo across the walls of the tiny chapel, like church bells, echoing through the tower that climbs almost endlessly above them, as the two knights doff their plate and mail. Anri looks even more a mess now, but a better kind – less wretched and more well-worked. She’s clad in a soft off-white tunic and leather pants, still stained with sweat and some blood from a couple blows that managed to catch her at the seams, her bun now hanging in a long, partially undone braid.

 

She’s absolutely stunning.

 

They sit in silence for a moment, sharing in the daily ritual of maintaining their weapons, content in each other’s company. Even so, there is a stiffness to Anri’s movement that she is unused to seeing, in what brief visits they shared in the shrine.

 

_Aldrich took everything else from me, you know? My home, however so much a home as it was, my few friends. Astora remained, but it did nothing. We were parentless, forsaken. There was nothing to miss, and therefore no sin._

A pause.

_I wake up every day and think, how lucky I am, to be able to claim to shoulder the duty to drag his wretched corpse to the fire. Though I give thee better odds, after all. It was thee who brought Farron’s Legion to heel._

She can feel her face reddening, flush with guilt as well as praise.

_I have accomplished nothing._

_…I wouldn’t put it that harshly, Anri. You made it this far._

_You are brave, indeed, to face your duty alone. I would do well to learn from you._

_I have no want of companionship, between thy welcome presence and that of the Firekeeper._

It is Anri’s turn to blush, now, and the Ashen One can’t help but grin before she quickly changes the subject.

_I did wish to speak with thee about something, though. Didst thou speak with Yuria of late? Has she made any propositions towards thee?_

Anri smirks. _Strangely enough, faceless women don’t do it for me._

_Not that kind of proposition, you ass. Still, faceless men, then?_

_…_

_I apologize. That was in poor taste._

_No, regardless, I prefer women that I can visibly admire. A helmet is well and good in combat, but it should add allure rather than hide it altogether. I don’t think I’ve ever seen our “Lady of Londor” without it._

She laughs softly in agreement. _Alas, her attempts at seduction may perhaps not be so far off. Yuria spoke to me of thee not too long ago._

_Gods forbid, I should hate to have to turn **her** down._

_She mentioned a convoluted ceremony, something to do with souls, and Londor, and others. She mentioned a fellow of hers guiding thee. She really has spoken to you of none of it?_

_I must admit, I haven’t given her much opportunity to speak with me thus far. My time at the shrine has been brief and in dialogue with few._

_I would be guarded, then. I suspect she will seek thee out shortly, and although she seems sincere, I still cannot shake the image of her before poor Yoel and wonder what her game is._

_He seemed sweet._

_He was._

There’s a pause, and Anri looks at her, searching for something in her face, until she can’t bear the look.

 

_Come here. Thy hair’s all askew. May I fix it for thee?_

_As you wish._

 

Anri shuffles closer, and they sit in comfortable silence as the Ashen One undoes Anri's braid, carding gently through her soft, sweat-damp hair. Soon she too almost forgets the harsh fierceness of this land, mind solely wrapped up in the warmth of the woman before her.

 

She forgets herself, and reaches for the stray strand against Anri’s neck. Her fingers brush warm skin, and Anri flinches and grabs the hand.

 

She cannot bear to speak of this, it cannot happen, she will not stand idly by and let Anri relinquish herself to this world that takes and takes and takes from her, from her and everyone in it, and-

 

-and Anri’s soft, callused palm presses hers to her neck, covering the creeping traitorous lines, and she buries her face in the woman’s hair, and it smells so deeply of her, of sweat and blood and _Anri_.

 

They stay there like that for a while, each clinging to the other in a tight and wordless embrace, weighed down by the emotions they cannot bring themselves to articulate.

 

Eventually Anri shifts in her arms, and the Ashen One pulls back just enough to let her, staring at the floor, unable to engage with this moment of brief weakness, betraying the tiny spark of hollowing she knows has taken root deep within her, where her own soul would be if she had one-

 

-and Anri’s eyes meet her own, and they’re tear-streaked like hers are, and she’s so overwhelmed by emotion that she can’t quite tell who moves first as their lips gently meet. Anri grabs the arm that she’s been holding her tight with and clutches it to her like her life depends on it, still holding the errant hand that brushed her neck, lacing her fingers with it, and it’s wonderful.

 

She loses herself in the softness of Anri’s lips, the strange press of damp cheek to her own, the heat of her mouth, the warmth of her hands, pressing tighter against her own, until she can feel the sturdy muscle of Anri’s abdomen through the cotton tunic beneath her hand, and she flushes at the strength of the woman in her arms, allowing herself to enjoy this moment while she can.

 

Anri slides her hand higher now, to her chest, and she’s got such strength that the Ashen One can _feel_ the outline of her pectorals even beneath the softness of her breast. She pulls Anri closer, into her lap, now, to continue kissing her properly, and Anri shifts again, twisting around now in her arms until they’re face to face. Anri’s soft leather pants ride up the hems of her own tunic as they wrap around her torso, gripping her back as she chases Anri’s tongue. Her hand, which Anri’s released from her neck, snakes its way up to clutch at the other knight’s hair, the half-finished braid now forgotten, dragging her fingers along Anri’s scalp in time with the motions of their mouths.

 

Anri relinquishes the hand over her breast only to slip her own beneath the Ashen One’s tunic and lift, pulling the sweaty fabric over her head, forcing her to let go of Anri for a split second before their hands are back on each other and she’s pulling Anri’s off in kind, and she’s lost in the motion of hands, the press of skin against skin, the sensation of Anri’s mouth moving along her cheekbone behind her ear, down to bite gently at her neck, and she hisses at the idea of Anri finding a similar curling darkness there before she’s swept up in the sensation of hands against scars, Anri’s calloused fingertips brushing over the marks the hounds bit into her earlier today on the bridge, across the spot Horace tore through her ribs, her own thumb sweeping over a long-faded mark a blade left across Anri’s breast, and she’s overwhelmed at the tide of emotion she can no longer hold back.

 

She _wants_. She wants so many things. She wants this knight in her lap to stay there forever, to bury her face deep in her skin so hard that they can’t tell each other apart again.

 

She wants to help her forget what they’ve done, what _she’s done_ , if only for a little while. She wants to be selfish, and wrap herself up in her and never leave, Lords be damned.

 

She wants to see her come apart from the touch of her tongue, sprawled out on the stone floor, _writhing_.

 

So she lowers her mouth to Anri’s stomach, and submits herself to her purpose.

 

_***_

Hours later, they lie together in various stages of undress, the harsh stone warmed by the heat of their bodies, watching the lights flicker across the horizon in the distance, the snow falling gently over the church graveyard.

_The snow is beautiful._

The Ashen One holds her closer for just a moment longer before speaking, pressing her face to a mark she’s left on Anri’s shoulder just to taste the newly familiar salt of her skin again.

_It truly is, is it not? Is there much snow, in Astora? I’m afraid this is the only time I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing it, myself._

_I believe so._

The firelight flickers across their discarded armor. They’re a mess, the pair of them, but they’ve always been. For once, the gentle ache of healing bruises is a welcome one.

 

She shifts, reluctant to withdraw, but knows she must. As much as they wish it, they cannot tarry here forever. Sooner or later, they must return to their duty.

_I should be on my way. I’d welcome thy company._

_I need a bit longer in front of the flame, I think. I still don’t feel entirely myself. Perhaps I’ll pay the shrine a visit._

_Of course. Then allow me to propose the following – while Aldrich’s carcass may be thine, I shall claim the Pontiff’s and then meet thee at Firelink? I could kill him a thousand times over for whatever foul sorcery of his birthed those damned hounds._

Anri chuckles, turning to gently run a finger over the freshly scarred tooth marks littered across the Ashen One’s torso before turning to meet her eye, and – _oh_ – her eyes are bright again, flickering flames, alight and playful, yet burning with resolve and something akin to indignation.

_I might meet you there. I should like a piece of the mastermind myself._

She armors up, piece by piece, in between a few soft kisses, eventually extricating herself from the other knight, who pulls on her tunic on and returns, languid, to lie for a while before the warm fire.

 

As the Ashen One leaves, face still warm with affection, she could have sworn she saw the faintest shimmer amidst the eerie collection of statues. She smiles, and thinks it nothing more than the glimmer of snow in the wind.

 

There is light in Irithyll after all, for so cold a place.

 

(Later, Anri sees it too, but she’s still only clad in her mere tunic, her sword still by the altar where a wayward foot knocked it, and then she sees nothing at all.)


	2. Chapter 2

The Pontiff, for such a high and mighty figure of the cloth, fights with such an overwhelming level of skill with a sword that she realizes only then that he was not truly born as such.

 

She falls over and over again. The spectral blade burns as it carves through an eye, pierces her lungs, tears through her torso, just above her hip. It’s only after the tenth attempt that she discovers his zealous fervor betrays him, and begins making ground.

 

Anri’s sign never appears.

 

She tries not to let it bother her too much.

 

They will meet at Firelink, then, and she will bring flowers for Anri as well as the Firekeeper, this time.

 

It’s only a short delay to gather small, snow-dusted bouquet of pale white blooms from the remains of the garden behind the Pontiff’s cathedral after she’s thoroughly wrecked it (and him). Well worth the effort.

 

***

 

She does not need her armor at Firelink Shrine, and it is a welcome change from the past series of days to disrobe properly and walk thus unburdened.

 

She scans the immediate area, searching for Anri’s gentle face. To her severe disappointment, Anri is not immediately visible – merely Ludleth, who gives her a nod of acknowledgement from his unfittingly large throne, and to her surprise, the Darkmoon Knight.

 

The Firekeeper is not present by the flame either. Perhaps Anri is with her.

 

They will have to speak, the three of them, at some point. She flushes, and is interrupted by the light tap of a leather glove on her shoulder.

 

She tries not to let her face fall as she realizes it’s merely Yuria.

 

_Greetings, Lord and Liege. Good tidings upon thee. Thy spouse is ready._

_I spoke to her in passing, and she knew little of thine plan, nor, to my surprise, had she met with thy fellow. I presume you two have spoken since?_

_Yes, as thou took it upon thineself to confront the Pontiff. The Darksign rises in the sky, and the girl awaits thee, in the hidden darkmoon chamber of Anor Londo._

_How fitting. I shall make haste, then. We can face Aldrich together, after that._

_By all means, good Lord._

_And Yuria?_

_Yes?_

_Do not lie to me again. The boundaries of my trust have been tested by thee enough as is._

_Yoel’s decisions were his own. He knew the cost. I regret thus overstepping my bounds, but rest assured, my fellow met thy knight shortly after thou left the chapel in Irithyll._

_Enough of this._

_As you wish._

_***_

 

She catches the Firekeeper almost immediately thereafter, lingering in seeming conversation with Greirat, who’s attempting to regale her with tales of his latest adventure. Her eyes follow the Ashen One as she approaches, and the knight cannot help but wonder if her attention was straining towards the hushed argument with Yuria rather than on the tale of many-legged-creatures and well-timed Catarinan knights.

 

The conversation with Yuria left a foul taste in her mouth. The Firekeeper’s brow wrinkles in soft concern beneath the silver metal of her tiara, and the Ashen One shoves the distaste down to grapple with later. Instead, she pulls the pale, sweet-smelling bundle from her pack, tied gently with a strip of cloth, and presents them to the woman.

 

_More flowers, Ashen One?_

 

She gives a single one to Greirat, who lets the ending to his story linger unspoken in the air, and reassures him she wants to hear the tale in full shortly. He nods, and she leads the Firekeeper down the hall, away from the darkness and Yuria’s machinations, to stand by the fire, just the two of them.

_Indeed. Irithyll is a brutal place, but again. Beauty amidst the rot and terror. I’d hoped to share that hope with thee. And with Anri, though she has, seemingly, set off to Anor Londo without me._

 

_I only require a couple for my book. Keep some, for thy fellow knight._

_Take a few more, for thy hair._

The Firekeeper laughs – a beautiful sound that echoes softly across the temple’s stones – and shakes her head, the sweetest smile still gracing her face as the knight gingerly hands the bundle over to weave some of the flowers between strands of her braid.

_Dost thou not have a duty to get back to?_

She does, but not before leaving her two parting gifts – a small sack of iridescent pebbles, because she just _finds_ things she’s compelled to ferry back to give the Firekeeper a taste of her journey, and a kiss to her brow. As she leaves, the Firekeeper catches her shoulder with a tentative hand.

 

_I could not help but overhear thy conversation earlier, and while I apologize for intruding, I fear something is amiss._

_What say thee?_

There is a pause, before the Firekeeper continues, in an unusually hushed voice.

_Ashen One, I saw Anri not. If she was truly to meet you here, as promised, and met not with a friend of Yuria as you spoke, for Yuria left not, I fear she may have been waylaid._

The distaste bubbles back up into her throat, and she shoves it down with all of her might.

_Perhaps thou missed her, in passing?_

_Perhaps._

A bitter pause, and then she sighs. The momentary comfort of home will wait, then. She will not rest easy here tonight.

_I will make haste, then. Firekeeper?_

_Yes?_

_My thanks._


	3. Chapter 3

As miserable as Irithyll was, Anor Londo is twice as bad thus far. _Damn_ Aldrich –  for his shitty servants and terrible taste in Pontiffs alike. She’s taken at least three great-arrows straight to the chest, and one to the head, which was at least over mercifully quick, but still. Frustration has made her sloppy, she’s certain, but there’s a sense of urgency nagging at the back of her mind, a slow, creeping fear she can’t quite acknowledge yet.

 

Because as brutal as the rooftops have been to her, Anri must be at least twice as distracted, already out of sorts and _this_ close to her quarry. She tries not to think too long about the darkness winding its way up her neck, creeping under her ear.

 

(Or the scent of her skin. Or the warmth of her embrace.)

 

Anri’s a strong one. She’ll pull through fine.

 

Still, she stumbles into the statue-filled atrium, condensation from the exertion clouding the inside of her visor in an uncomfortable haze, and slings her greatsword behind her. Five minutes. Just to breathe. And then she’ll keep going.

 

After a moment, she wanders towards the statue of Lord Gwyn, attention piqued by virtue of it being the only object of note in the otherwise surprisingly featureless room. It’s rather lacking in detail, and isn’t anything much to look at. Perhaps time caught up with it as well.

 

She sits at the base, and leans back to rest for a moment against the stonework, but falls flat on her back, her armor clattering against the tiled floor. Illusory, then. Perhaps it might be wiser to rest behind its protection. Dusting herself off, she gingerly steps through the illusory veil, sword once again at the ready, just in case.

 

What greets her at the base of the stairs is a familiar and welcome sight.

 

The pilgrim of Londor isn’t Yoel, but she looks the part quite dramatically. It’s only a quick moment before the knight lifts the woman, who’s instinctually bent a knee, and kicked off a friendly chatter.

 

_Welcome, gracious Lord!_

_What is thy name, friend?_

_Like you, I surrendered mine to time long ago. I pray you make haste._

_Please, the formality isn’t necessary. What can I do for thee?_

_Thy spouse awaits thee, thou art very near her._

_Art thou the one Yuria spoke of?_

_I met thy lady, indeed – both of them, yes. She awaits thee further in, for the ceremony. Take this ceremonial sword, to bind your souls together._

The hunched woman hands over an unwieldy blade, the length of her greatsword but not nearly as sturdy – too fine by far, with an equally intricate guard. She takes it and tests the balance, momentarily, and is pleasantly surprised to find it better than first glance led her to believe.

 

_I know little of this ceremony._

_Thy blood, marked by the Dark Sigils, and hers, equally so, or perhaps less, I know not, but bound together – that is how._

_I shall just ask thee more specifics shortly, wait thee here a moment, I must-_

She takes off quickly down the almost endless corridor, and would have missed the voice old woman’s voice behind her had the hall not held an uncanny echo.

 

_May you be the truest Lord of Londor yet._

There is something at the end, a tall dais of sorts, perhaps, and she rushes down with little regard for her own safety. It’s stupid, really – there could be a thousand unwanted things down there. This could all be some mad trap set by Yuria, she could be about to have her limbs rent asunder by some new monstrosity of Aldrich’s puppets, or worse, more hounds, but her footsteps echo through the hallway as she walks with barely restrained speed.

 

There are no hounds, and there are no monstrosities, but there is no Anri either.

 

Nonetheless, her blood turns to frost at the sight of what lies before her.

 

Anri’s armor is laid gingerly across the dais atop a red silk shroud, gauntlets clasped together over the breastplate as if in prayer. Her helmet rests beside her, positioned as if someone was trying to feign a scene from a painting. But something uncanny still lies where the helmet ought, beneath a strip of embroidered white satin, atop the pile of soft feathers.

 

A footstep, and then another, as she gingerly climbs the dais, trying not to jump to the conclusion her gut screams at her to face, focusing all her effort on putting a foot in front of another. She bends down, removes her left gauntlet, and reaches for the set of clasped hands, hovering over them for a second before resting her own against the polished metal.

 

The armor is still warm. The body within it doesn’t move. She cannot even bring herself to call the knight’s name.

 

She falls to her knees and inhales deeply, trying to steel herself, or at the very least to stop her wayward limbs from shaking. There is only one way to know for certain, and she lifts just enough of the cloth and a lock of her loose hair to see the tell-tale inky color creeping up the veins beneath her ear, and she recoils at the accidental sensation of Anri’s skin beneath her own.

 

Her body is still warm.

 

This is dark magic for certain, and she curses herself for not taking the opportunity to learn more magic while she could still stomach to set foot in the shrine, to take Orbeck up on his lessons despite her complete lack of knowledge on the subject, or even ability to _read,_ because at least then she’d be able to have some idea as to what to fucking _do,_ how to fix this.

 

This is her fault. This is her fault, she should never have left Anri alone in the chapel, she should never have listened to a single word Yuria spoke, should have never let this charade go this far-

 

-she should never have left. She should have stayed there in the chapel, and let Anri have her again on the floor, and said fuck it all to the Lords, to Yuria and her _fucking_ church, and left.

 

And she has no idea how to fix it, how to pull Anri out of whatever Yuria’s madwoman has done to her without rending her soul from her body or killing her permanently, or worse, driving her completely hollow, and it’s all she can do to take her helmet off and press her face to the other woman’s armor, and sob into the lukewarm metal of her breastplate and then the crook of her collarbone, grasping a gauntleted hand in one of her own.

 

The stupid sword falls by her side with a clatter, clashing against Anri’s helmet before striking the floor once, twice, three times.

 

Somewhere, through the murky fabric of time, a bell tolls. The world seems to slow around her, narrowing to a dark room, the warm yet lifeless body of a friend, and the echoes of pained sobs.

 

What must the Darkmoon think? Loyal to an absent father to the end, betrayed and fed to a beast, to see a sanctum thus defiled by their own domain – trickery? It is all she can do to hold back a scream.

 

She must look. She cannot leave without seeing her face for certain.

 

The Hollowing has made it higher, creeping now at the edges of her closed eyelids. Her skin, still warm, bears a deathly and unusual pallor. Her expression is pained rather than peaceful.

 

She cannot leave her here like this. She cannot do it.

 

She cannot do that, either.

 

There is only one thing she can do, aside from murdering Yuria later, viscerally, with her bare fucking hands.

 

She can carry Anri with her, and help her gut Aldrich as painfully as possible.

 

Wiping her eyes against her bared arm, she steels herself, and begins to rummage in one of the pouches at her belt before pulling out a half-bundle of slightly crushed soft white blossoms. She places all but two between the gauntleted hands, a final gift. The first is tucked behind Anri’s ear, atop her blackened veins and beneath her soft golden hair, and another behind her own, where she can feel the crawl of a similarly icy sensation.

 

She grasps the sword in one hand, and then it moves, like it has a mind of its own, and she’s suddenly not ready, not in control, she can’t do this, but it moves nonetheless, pulled by something brutal in her gut, dragging her arms up, up, and then, in one sharp movement, _down._

 

Feathers scatter at the impact. The blade seems to stick in the floor before she can extricate her fingers from it. Her knees grow wet, and she cannot bear to look down.

 

And there is a familiar rush of souls, and then blackness – nothing.

 

*** 

 

She comes to eventually, slumped in a puddle of coagulating blood and newly stained feathers, collapsed in an undignified heap. Her hand comes away red as she wipes her eyes, and she feels her stomach turn as she tries frantically to figure out what happened, and then she looks at the scene before her.

 

Anri’s body, with a ceremonial sword sticking three feet out of her face. Her blood. It’s Anri’s. She did this.

 

A familiar, pained voice whispers in her ear.

 

_Thank you._

She flinches, and that singular, small motion is more than enough – bile rises in her throat and she barely has time to turn away from the body before she’s vomiting spectacularly onto the stonework.

 

There’s a subtle flash of sympathy, pulling deep from within her, as she continues to dry heave, the image of the bloody mess on the altar burned into her mind’s eye, aided by the unmistakable thick scent of blood in the air.

 

Souls churn within her, as if something’s shoving them to the side. She speaks to no one at first, herself perhaps, groaning as she tries to rub the image from her eyes but smears them further with her stained hands, mingling the hot tears with equally hot blood. Her voice cracks unevenly, echoing tentatively and painfully through the too-large chamber.

 

_What madness is this?_

 

The voice speaks again, and it’s unmistakable who it belongs to. Is this a side effect of hollowing? Did Horace hear her too, whispering in his ear as he waded through knee-high waters, lost and alone in the dark? Is she losing herself already? Everything hurts, and it cuts deep to the core of her being, the shock and the grief, the self-reflected horror, all of it surpassing even the feeling of a blade to the gut. It is all she can do to humor herself, to utter her name in a whisper, to take what little reassurance it will grant her.

 

_Anri?_

_What’s happening? What have you done? What is this?_

The tears flow again, and she can no longer bear to open her eyes, pulling a bloodied knee into her chest and wrapping her arms tightly around herself, as if that’ll help at all. She does not know if she’s pleading to the air, begging forgiveness from Anri, the gods, or even herself, but it’s all she can do, murmuring beneath her breath.

_I am so, so sorry._

_What happened?_ There’s a moment, and suddenly the sensation of having her mind carded through like Orbeck turns through his books when he’s particularly focused, and she cannot bear to relive the memories that flash before her vision – conversations with Yuria, Anri’s frozen face contorted in pain, the ceremonial sword, while the smell of blood and vomit still lingers in the air. It ceases after that, and there is a moment of silence, aside from heavy, stuttered breaths, half-sobs, before it speaks again.

_Am I dead? How can it be that we still speak thus? I never could do this with any of the souls I picked up._

_I don’t know what’s happening. Anri, please,-_

_Get out of here. Please. I don’t want to be in this room._

_But, the body-_

_Leave it. Leave. **Go**. Do not make me smell my own blood for a second longer._

_***_

There is no old woman by the stairs. She seems to have known enough of the Ashen One, of what was to take place, to make herself scarce rather than stick around for the consequences.

The Ashen One trudges slowly up the steps, one hand clinging to her own sword like a child’s toy, some barrier to save her from the horrors of the darkness.

 

Anri’s soul speaks to her again, slightly more composed now.

_The last thing I remember is the church, in Irithyll. There was a strange shimmer, and then nothing more. Pain, perhaps. Like that moment between being torn apart and returning to the ash, but never ceasing._

_An assassin. Yuria-_

 

_-Please let me assist thee in tearing Yuria apart._

 

_How is this possible? We’re unkindled – I always was certain we had no soul. Something about being a more capable vessel._

_Thy guess is as good as mine. Perhaps we have distinguishable enough souls after all._ _Or perhaps it has something to do with…. that._

She can feel the soul pull, and turns to spare one final look at the chamber at the end of the corridor, at the body bleeding on the dais.

 

_That’s disorienting._

 

_Anri, I can’t… I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I left._

_You aren’t my keeper. It was my own damn fault too._

She flinches, and does what she does best – put one foot in front of the other, and trudge forward along her path, limping towards her quarry, clinging to the thread of purpose it offers.

 

_I will make it up to thee. Aldrich’s corpse is still thine, and I would see thee to it._

_Together, then._


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for gore, cannibalism, etc. Basically, Aldrich ahead.

The scent of rot and gore, mingling with refuse and something sickly sweet grows stronger the closer to the palace she gets. Aldrich cannot be far off now, and she can feel Anri stir within her with a mixture of eager anticipation, rage, and disquiet.

 

The palace’s floor is smeared with ichor, the thick caustic muck betraying any hope she had of quietly making her way to the heretical saint. The smell of corruption is even thicker here than it was in Farron Keep, and she finds herself glad she cannot bear a single pained thought for the fate of the man who fell to such depravity. At least the followers of Artorius had good intentions, even as they fell to fear and suspicion. And, for all the joys of Farron’s poisonous swamp, it was far less disgusting.

 

She finds him eventually, holed up in the defiled remnants of a once-grand chamber, relishing in the puddle of vomit and blood and _shit_ that overwhelms the room as he stands there, triumphant, amidst the heaping mounds of rotting flesh piled against the odd pillar as he puppets the half-devoured god child.

 

The Dark Sun’s arms contort, writhing at odd, unnatural angles as they conjure a spectral blade and flinch with pain at the same instant.

 

_Gwyn almighty. T- He’s eating them alive._

She holds her blade firm at Anri’s words, and allows rage to overwhelm her as she charges at the heaping mass of revolting flesh.

 

But her temper gets the better of her, and she’s too caught up in the whirlwind of emotions - Anri’s and her own - to pay attention to the spectral bow pointed into the air above her. A sing-song voice erupts from the Dark Sun’s mouth, high and low at odd, inhuman angles, and hundreds and hundreds of arrows rain down upon the room. It’s all she can do to pray she turns to ash before her body hits the slime.

 

Another attempt, another slog through the sludge, and another pitiful fall, the acidic muck stinging in the countless arrow wounds. Anri burns within her, and the two of them rage and cry and pick themselves up and wipe the filth off their face and surrender themselves once more unto the breach. And they fall, writhing, into the muck. Again and again.

 

She tries surrendering control to Anri, once. That goes about as well as she could have expected. Anri, while a capable knight, has little experience with the unwieldy great-swords her own body is equipped to handle. And Aldrich has had far more practice at puppetry than she. 

 

Hours pass, or perhaps days. She’s lost count at this point, hallucinating, imagining Anri standing above her, her soft eyes filled with understanding, holding her as she drowns in filth and ichor. And she approaches it yet again, the quivering mass of what was once a pustulent man, sword out, and a voice that is not her own asks him if he remembers a small orphanage in Astora. He is too far gone, dissolved into the warped image of the sea he dreamt of, to possess a mouth and voice of his own to answer the question.

 

So she answers it herself - they both do - chamber ringing, giving voice to the scream echoing through their twin soul.

 

_Murdering bastard. You fucking monster. Why won’t you just DIE?_

  

There is a sickening squelch of bloated flesh rupturing, the smell of burning viscera in the air as his ignited soul sets the oily murk around him alight. Half-digested bones scrape across her armor, leaving smeared lines amongst the coating of filth, as they fall from the gash she’s left in his body.

 

The fire burns from within her now, brighter, stronger, fueled by her fury and the flames licking at her heels and his rapidly dissolving fat. A final swing, at the hip of the Darkmoon, and the creature before her melts into mere flesh, finally indistinguishable from the sea of his disgusting refuse. She shudders.

 

Her side aches from where a spear caught her, the state of her armor is repulsive, coated in ichor and the blood of what must be thousands, shit and vomit, but the Saint of the Deep is _dead_ , and her soul is alight in a way it’s never been before. It’s the first time since the chapel of the Darkmoon that the soul bound to her own isn’t agitated, but instead radiates a calming peace. For but a moment, all the pain and terror burns away – _she_ burns – and it’s beautiful.

 

_I owe this to you. Thank you. Truly._

And then quieter, she chases the lingering whisper of a thought.

 

_Horace, we’ve done it._

 

***

 

They do not return to the shrine, after that.

 

Instead, the Ashen One makes a small detour, back to another musty swamp, reeking of sulfur, and stands awhile at a small grave that she can only assume Anri placed there after Horace fell. It’s simple – a halberd, shield, and rock – but it’s attentively adorned in tiny, multicolored prism stones, small lights twinkling in the darkness.

 

_I figured we ought to stop by, now that Aldrich is gone._

_I appreciate the sentiment. As would he, I suppose._

_It’s quite beautiful._

_My thanks._

_It is, quite literally, the very least I am able._

_No, my thanks for Aldrich, I mean._

_He deserved his end. I wish I could have killed him as many times as I fell._

_Thy tenacity is admirable. I’m not certain I would have held the same._

_Thy hatred of him was far more personal. That’s far too little credit to thyself. Nonetheless, Anri, we ought to speak._

_About what? About Yuria?_

_I cannot not confront her about this. The Firekeeper, as well, if thou’rt amenable. I was also considering whether Orbeck might have some ideas about what transpired._

_I very much doubt it. He seemed more of a scholarly fellow than a priest. Yuria dabbles in dark miracles more than anything else._

_Still, she loathes him._

_Perhaps. Anyway, as I mentioned before, I’m all for a blade to her throat, but I too would prefer some answers, first._

_We are of one mind, then._

_Quite literally._

She freezes. _Is this subject one appropriate for thy ceaseless wit?_

_You stabbed me in the face, and you want to instruct **me** in the fine art of propriety?_

_…_

_All right, that’s unfair. But forgive me if I am high strung on the matter._

_No, it’s entirely fair._

_I spoke too harshly. I know there was little option, and for what it’s worth, I’m grateful thou did not leave me thus to linger for some other unsavory pilgrim to slit my throat days down the line._

_And for what it’s worth, I rather like thy witty tongue._

There’s a small wave of comfortable satisfaction from Anri’s soul, a hint of a half-formed clever innuendo, and that makes at least part of her want to laugh.

_It’s just been a particularly rough patch._

_Truer words have never left thy tongue. Let’s be off, then? I fear I seem able to access thy sense of smell, and honestly, I’m not certain I can recall a moment where a bath would be more welcome in however many years I’ve passed._

_Ugh. First thing after we deal with Londor’s hierophant._

_Lead the way._


	5. Chapter 5

Her boots leave a wet trail as she marches through the cobbled stones of Firelink Shrine – sulfurous stagnant water, half-dissolved flesh, and beneath it all, her blood mingled with the stain of Anri’s, leaving a trail of defiled ground in her wake.

 

She wants to tear the helmet off and smear it across Yuria’s face.

Yuria stands at the end of her habitual corridor, faceless helm expectantly turned in her direction, gloved arms gingerly crossed. Her voice echoes through the metal and stone as she calls out to the approaching figure.

_Ahh our Lord and liege. I presume thy holy vows are sworn?_

She grits her teeth. Answers, first, though her fingers _itch_ for her blade.

_How could thou thus betray us both, who put such faith in thy good intentions? What of thy promises? I should never have trusted thee after what thou did to good Yoel._

_Chide me not, good Lord. Thou would’st be sacrificing far more if thou played the part the long-dead gods of Lordran wished. Anri yet lives, preserved inside thee._

_If thou can deem an existence as mere soul “living.”_ Spitting the words, her cheeks flush, hot and painful at their shared memory of a sword to the face, of blood seeping into her boots.

_She lives on as thy spouse, and will be restored upon thy claiming of the fire. A task that, I reiterate, may only be done with the strength she lent thee._

_And I’m supposed to trust thee on that, after I have been given not one instance to suggest that thou art even remotely capable of frank honesty?_

She pauses, and takes a moment to calm herself, steadying her voice.

_Yuria, the greater good matters not in the wake of mine own convictions._

There is a lingering hint of emotion now, beneath Yuria’s calm voice, a simmering frustration.

_Thou see’st it that way now, but thou knowst not the true extent of evil that lurks beneath thy previous ones. The gods permitted the rotted Deep-Saint lordship over the flame. The giants were extinguished for the sake of its power, betrayed and ruined in such a manner as caused even more harm once Yhorm awakened. And the sickening truth of Lordran is one thou has still yet to witness.  Go, liege. Ferry thy dear friend and spouse through the shadows of the palace. Decide then what path thou seek’st to walk. But I prithee, play the usurper. When the moment comes to link the fire, I suspect thee, as Londor prays, shall long to wrest it from its mantle._

_For I have met none more fitting than thee to weareth the true face of mankind. Thy moral convictions only affirm my beliefs._

As much as she hates to admit it, Yuria’s logic – for this, at least, the duty of the Unkindled – is sound, even if the pedantic sentiment makes her want to scream. The gods are dead. Eaten, even, by the depraved priest. All of this flameseeking has enabled countless horrors, from Yhorm to even the willingness of Yoel to throw himself at her undeserving feet.

 

And to Yuria’s sick machinations.

_Give me one reason not to tear thy flesh from thy bones at this instant._

_Avenging thy knight against me will not make thee feel better._

_I guarantee you, it will._

_Yet here I still stand. Again, a testament to the strength of thy character, that thou consider the consequences of thy actions above thy base desires._

_Then tell me why such deception was necessary for thy “moral” purpose._

****

_Would thou have listened, had I laid before thee the necessary sacrifices? We are made of different matter._

_…_

_Continue on thy path. Bear witness to the secret atrocities of the line of Lordran. See then, what horrors have been committed in the name of the greater good, and consider once more whether thy originally charged duty is not more so an act of misplaced faith._

As she turns, clearly nothing more to be gained from the woman who is no doubt claiming this conversation as a victory, she can hear Anri’s voice, low and bitter.

 

_I want to punch her in her smug fucking face._

 

_Believe me, the feeling is mutual. Yet, at this point, I feel compelled to refuse to give her the satisfaction. At least, immediately. Perhaps upon further reflection._

_Suit thyself, then. So. What now?_

_We ask Orbeck, I think. He's smart and learned and the two of them loathe each other. And if we decide to let her live, for the moment, then I suppose we ask him to keep his eye firmly trained on her. And then we have a bath, because if I have to smell that slimy bastard’s disgusting stench for an hour more, I fear I’ll hollow._

_Please. Gods above, yes._

_***_

 

_Orbeck. I would beg thy council on a matter._

Orbeck, who’s currently hunched over the waterlogged parchment she brought back from Farron, lowers his paper and gives her a quizzical look. _What sort of matter, Ashen One?_

_One for which thy scholarly mind might be of some aid._

 

_Indeed? Thy interest in scholarly pursuits is veritably rare. Sit._

 

She sits on the step beside him, keeping a polite distance from his notes and materials given her current condition.

 

_So, what scholarly council might I provide for thee?_

 

_I know thou art a scholar of sorceries, Orbeck, but I assume, given thy capacity to recognize holy texts, that thou have some familiarity with the theory of miracles and their magic._

 

_So, a question on spell theory, from someone who does not use them. And a serious one, at that, for I know thee, and thou would'st not bother me over something thou deemed trivial._

 

_I am at a cruel impasse, Orbeck, and I need to understand whether I'm being strung along._

 

_Resurrection._

 

_Ah. Yes. That **is** a non-trivial matter._

 

_Surely there's theory of it. Is it possible?_

_  
Certainly, there's theory. There are tales of powerful miracle casters capable of reviving comrades as they fall in battle. Ask the woman of Carim, I'm certain she knows stories of the kind._

 

_And what of restoration of the body?_

 

_The body?_

 

_Say you wished to restore a body to a soul severed from it._

 

_I can't say I've heard of such a thing, but regenerating a physical form would require a tremendous amount of power, and-_

 

_-what if you had, say..._

 

_Ashen One, what is this truly about?_

 

_...the strength of a Lord of Cinder?_

_***_

 

The two speak for a time in hushed whispers, as she explains, in a wavering voice, the series of events following Irithyll. Orbeck needles her with stern and increasingly horrified questions, scholarly fascination and human horror both evident in his tone and expression. 

_Is there a chance that what she spoke of was possible?_

_I am not a holy man, as you well know. That woman’s knowledge is of miracles, and dark ones of that._ _That said, some are regenerative. It’s not impossible, but it’s beyond my capability. And, quite frankly, it's not something I'm interested in investigating._

_Might I beg of thee a favor, then?_

_Perhaps._

_Keep thy eyes firmly trained on her. I know thy role, Orbeck, and am not ignorant of thy former profession. Should she take pains to harm others here, or flee, I beg of thee – detain her._

_Gladly._

 

_One more favor, I fear?_

 

He snorts _What of it? I suppose I might be able to manage, given the exciting nature of the most recent scroll thou gave me._

 

She reaches behind her ear, and pulls out a wilting flower.

 

He sighs at her, raising his eyebrows.

 

_Can you not manage a cleaner one? That's, quite frankly, disgusting. Surely another would substitute._

 

_Please, Orbeck._

 

He rolls his eyes, but there's a hint of sympathy in his averted gaze she's never seen Orbeck wear. _If you insist on it, then._

_***_

 

It's has been ages since she last slept, she thinks to herself. When was it? The few hours caught with Anri in the church, for certain, but before that she can’t remember taking any rest since she began venturing in earnest into Carthus.

 

There is a small chamber, in the shrine, that the Firekeeper revealed to her what seems like a lifetime ago. She presses a cracked stone and a corresponding section of the wall slides away, revealing a sparsely furnished room. A small fire flickers at the hearth beside an empty tub. Stripping her muck-stained gauntlets, she begins to fill the heavy basin over the flame with water from a pump.

 

_I knew not this was here._ Anri’s soul hums with a curious satisfaction that’s both welcome and painful. This whole situation is painful.

She sheds her armor, dumping it unceremoniously on the floor, and slides down the wall to rest next to it as she waits for the water to warm. Her hair is a mess, she’s sweaty and disgusting, and she wants to scrub every inch of skin until there’s nothing left to remind her of-

 

_Stop._

 

Anri’s voice whispers in her ear, and that’s almost too much for her after everything. Her eyes burn.

 

_It will be all right, in the end. I have faith in thee._

_I deserve it not._

There’s a moment of quiet, her cheeks wet and the flame crackling in the hearth against the cast-iron pot.

 

_Aldrich is dead. That, if nothing else, is cause for celebration._

 

It is true. The monster is slain. She accomplished that, at least, in spite of everything. He would trouble the world no more. The thought brings a smile to her damp cheeks.

 

The bubbling of water interrupts the train of thought, and she begrudgingly rises to pour it out into the tub on the other side of the room.

 

Stripping off her tunic, she can see the mottled bruises and newly-faded scars. Arrow-marks, many of them.

 

_I wish I could hold thee right now._

_What does it feel like? Being thus – a soul?_

_It is like seeing through thy eyes, but with not the will to direct them. I feel thy pain, albeit with a measure of distance. Thy body is not mine, but I feel thy wounds as well as the chill of the air as if it was mine own._

_In that case, I shall strive to receive fewer arrow wounds._

_For thy sake, as well as mine, I’d certainly appreciate it._

There is a moment of silence as she takes inventory of her injuries, gently pressing the soft pad of her thumb into bruised skin at her hip just above her trousers, gauging the pain, making a series of notes as to where to check her guard more thoroughly in the future.

 

She’s putting off the bath and she knows it, but-

 

She feels stuck.

 

It’s not as if she’s a particularly private person, exactly, but she’s been on her own for as long as she can remember. Traveling with a companion is one thing, to be sure, but this – Anri – is something else entirely.

 

Where are they going, the two of them?

 

One foot in front of the other. One pant leg, then the other. The touch of an aching foot to the warmth of a hot water. The blood will come off. They will find a way.

 

She scrubs her skin raw by the fire before fully lowering herself into the basin. She will not soak in Aldrich’s bile, nor can she bring herself to let herself linger in Anri’s blood.

 

The blood staining her knees melts off into the hot water.

_Do me a favor, friend._

 

The voice, soft and tentative, curls lovingly around a portion of her soul, striking deep within.

_Anri, anything._

So she reclines in the bathwater, and lets the pain of the world melt away along with her body.

 

It is a strange thing, that they are doing here. Enough, despite everything, to bring a flush of embarrassment to her face. But Anri’s voice is soft and welcoming, and it envelops her in a sense of closeness. The whisper in her ear – in her soul – is agreeably intimate, and she is able to forget for a while.

 

They both are.

 

She loses herself in Anri’s soul, in the gentle urgings and the corresponding movements of her hand, and Anri loses herself in her own pleasure, in the strange sensations of warm water and a gliding hand across a skin that is not her own.

 

They are no longer alone. The world, grim and harsh a place as it is, cannot separate them now.


	6. Chapter 6

The garden of the consumed king reeks, dripping with pus of man and the heavy smell of rotted vegetation.

 

And the man – the beast – within it howls with the inhuman fury of something that would sacrifice everything for a single shot at perfection.

 

It’s despicable, it’s corrupt, and she shares Anri’s rising indignation, bile rising in her throat and the pounding of her heart. Those who seek the flame rarely pay the price, rarely sacrifice themselves. All of Lothric’s people, lost, abandoned, corrupted, and for what? A dragon-child? A dead child?

 

The perfect pile of ash?

 

Another woman, violated and killed. A kingdom in ruins.

 

And he lives still, twisted and warped by his actions, and he has the audacity to believe all the pain he caused for others was worth an attempt to bolster his already bloated legacy.

 

Kingship is not enough to satisfy men like Oceiros, when proximity to godhood is an option. Ascension. Perfection.

 

What did he see, in the fire, that drove him mad for wanting?

 

Or perhaps it was not the fire at all, but rather, the allure of power and perfection to an already spoiled mind, unconcerned with consequence and incapable of sympathy with those to whom he bore responsibility.

 

It is irresponsible to blame the flame for our failings, as men. But we have done terrible things in its name. It is too often a crutch, enabling us to justify otherwise unjustifiable atrocities.

 

And yet, as she soon finds, letting it die solves nothing. It is simply another abandonment of responsibility, for which the rest of mankind is forced to pay, until some brave soul begins the cycle anew. 

 

For the first time, she thinks she’s begun to understand Yuria’s perspective.

 

The world cannot grow, trapped in a cycle of burning and death, when every action is buried beneath a layer of ash.

 

***

Her slow, heavy footfalls echo through the hallway as she approaches the ornate double doors.

 

Behind them, a withered figure sits atop feather-dusted cushions, draped in ragged finery.

 

_Welcome, Unkindled One, Purloiner of Cinders._

 

She sheathes her blade at her back and inhales deeply.

 

_Prince Lothric. I would speak with you._

_The mantle of Lord interests me none._

_I find myself unsurprised. I saw what became of the former king. It is why I’ve come._

_A Champion of Ash, come all this way for what, then, if not some misguided attempt to drag me towards a duty that I sought not?_

_I bear you no ill will. I would sooner see the flame fade permanently, the cycle broken, than kindle it mineself._

_Let it all rot away, then. Return to thy shrine. Or leave altogether. I care not._

_That will solve nothing, I fear. I cannot stand by while the world rots._

_And what business is it of **thine** to solve this perversion of the world?_

_As one of its inhabitants, I suppose._

_I suggest casting off thy presumed responsibility, then._

_And do what? Hollow slowly, knowing I could do more?_

_Careful, Ashen One._

_Despite your father’s mad hubris, you still have a duty to your people as sovereign. The cycle of kindling the flame is desperately broken, I’m with mind of you on that-_

_-Then leave me be. Or watch the world burn from here, with us, if it is thy will. This spot marks our grave. But you may rest here too, if you like._

_I wish to petition you for your help in breaking the cycle. You have repute as a scholar, knowledge of your father’s sorceries as well as your own miracles._

He waves a hand weakly, cutting her off.

 

_There are archives enough below us, should you wish to search them. I will stop thee not._

_I fear that is not within my capability, even discounting thy mad subjects that crawl their corridors._

_Well, spend thy time working on that, then. I will not spend a second longer on matters of the fire. It is no longer my concern._

_Do you not wish to prevent others from sharing your fate? Other kingdoms from suffering that which thy father inflicted upon them?_

_I care not, and neither would thee, had’st thou lived my life. You may have been charged with such a duty, but it compares not to my burden._

Anri, it seems, has had enough.

_It seems you know little of the world, Prince._

He raises an eyebrow.

 

_Are you too young to be acquainted with the Saint of the Deep, who of late crawled across thy kingdom?_

_And this is relevant how?_

_Like thy father, spurred on by the flame, he sought a perverted divinity. And, like thy father, the people with power beneath him excused his foul sins on the basis of the importance of feeding the flame._

_The priest is of no concern to me, or my kingdom._

_Well, you see, prince, he ate my family. Every friend, but one. Tore through an orphanage in Astora and glutted his vile habit on the children within. None thought to question him for it. And instead of damning the world for it, I would give everything for none to know that horror again. You place your pain on a pedestal._

 

Anri's words echo through the chamber as the Elder Prince makes himself known at the insult, the plates of his armor rustling as he drags himself across the floor beneath the dais to face the smaller knight. The twinned souls - unknowing pair of them - stare each other down, each waiting for a word, an order, the other to break the tension.

Anri's opinion has left her resolute. The Ashen One breaks the silence. _I_ _require thy assistance to wrest the fire from its grasp. They presence, to open the way to the kiln. While I have shed enough blood, and wish not to fight thee, speaking with me has solidified my course of action._

 

She reaches back for her greatsword, scraping the metal across the sheathe as she unsheathes the blade, pointing it at the figure above her before aiming the tip at the crawling figure below.

_Draw thy sword, Elder Prince._

***

Breathing heavily, she slumps back against the remnants of a fractured pillar, pulling her helmet off so she can finally _breathe._

 

It’s done.

 

The body of a monarch lies strewn on the silken rug before her, curled over his brother’s broken arm. The line of Lothric is ended.

 

It was necessary, she’s still certain of that, but she can’t shake the sensation quietly gnawing at her core. The blood seeping into scattered feathers stirs up uncomfortable memories.

 

Hawkwood was right. There was no glory in this.

 

_So it is possible, then._

The rumors were true. Their souls were bound, both she and Anri are certain. The prince confessed as much even as his miracles raised his brother from the dead.

 

_It is._

Outside, through shattered stained glass windows, bare-winged angels mourn their reluctant king.

_I don’t want Yuria to be the only one right in this world._

_She wasn’t. And even if she didn’t mean ill, I refuse to give her that much credit. But-_

_-But she’s right on this, isn’t she?_

_I fear she might be._


	7. Chapter 7

_Are you ready, my friend?_

Countless ages, cyclically churning, feeding upon the cruelty of their predecessors and the ash of nameless sacrifices.

 

And what would undo them all, break the world free of the men dragging it with them back into the past for fear of the world moving past their brief moment of glory?

 

A nameless knight, a piece of ash. An orphan, struck low at her lowest, luckless soul.

 

Marching ever onwards, through flame, through dark, for the sake of peaceful respite.

 

Freedom from past, from the duty they’d been shackled to. From flame. From the threat of the dark. From needless, wasteful loss.

 

Of Yoel. Of Horace.

 

Greirat.

 

Anri.

 

Herself.

 

_What do you want, truly?_

The fire before her, burning low in an endless field of flowers and wrought iron weapons, jammed into the ground, is so, _impossibly_ -

 

_-small._

All this over a pittance, really. She’s been thrown onto larger pyres.

 

_I want…_

_To fear not the dark._

 

They will not fight amongst themselves for another age. She raises Farron’s greatsword.

 

The fire churns, and a creature of flame and ash rises, charred armor burning beneath a smoldering sky.

 

Sparks fly from the both of them – the ash, shedding embers, and the burning soul of the world leaving a trail of fire in its wake. Heated metal scraping against its likeness. There’s no horror here, no warped innocents or depraved tyrants, none of the abyss’s darkness.

 

Just a final test of skill. And oh, she relishes it – the chance to fight with that mantle cast off, to enjoy the challenge for once.

 

The kiln, overgrown with wildflowers, ignites as the two of them blaze through it, weaving around each other in a frenzied dance turned conflagration. Her blood boils, coursing with adrenaline and relief – _they’re almost free, but one obstacle left –_ and Anri guides her hands and eyes and ears and they catch each other’s mistakes, drawing strength from their joined minds – Anri knows her body now, gently nudging muscles to dodge beneath the sweep of a lance, a spray of burning flame. To lift the shield – _quick!_ – as a soul spear nearly catches her at the edge of her left shoulder.

 

They fight in synchrony, unlike the amalgamation of kindled souls churning within the constantly morphing figure before them. It makes all the difference.

 

An opening – it pulls back from a blast of _something_ – is that _lightning? –_ and reveals the crack in its chest plate from an earlier strike, and the two of them bolt, tearing up sod and burnt plants and kicking up dusty ash, before jumping to bring the wolf blade down with all the force they can muster.

 

The sky rains sunlight for the last time as the Soul of Cinder crumbles into a smoldering pile of ash.

 

Her muscles are shaking from the exertion and adrenaline both.

 

They’ve done it. The kiln lays open before them, with all the uncertainty it brings.

 

Her fingers tremble as she removes her helmet.

 

A moment then, before the plunge into the unknown.

 

She can feel her face curl into a smile, and whether hers or Anri’s, she cannot tell, and she cannot bring herself to care. With childlike abandon, she throws herself backwards into the field of blazing flowers, allowing herself to linger there, just a moment, and enjoy herself.

 

The ash is warm and welcoming. A lifetime ago, she would have thrown herself into its multitudes without a second thought.

 

_It’s a pity that we only just recently got the hang of fighting in tandem._

She sits up.

 

_How fare thee? I am-_

_-nervous, yes. Well, I suppose, if Yuria’s wrong, we’ve at least an age to figure out a solution._

_I wish I could kiss thee._

_For luck?_

_No, more in celebration._

_Go shed the yoke of fate, then, and pull the plug on the universe. Maybe, if we’re both lucky, I can kiss thee afterwards._

A hand brushes her ear, where a small white flower that Orbeck preserved for her remains, slightly wilted.

 

_I wouldn’t have it any other way._

 

One foot in front of the other, then, across a smoldering field of ash.

 

The First Flame is even smaller up close.

 

Unbuckling a gauntlet, she discards the soft leather glove on the ground besides the greatsword. The heat of it, even burning low as it is, is unexpectedly powerful, unexpectedly _primal_ , calling her towards it, resonating with the strength of her soul, the souls within-

 

–but she reaches for it with her arm and the very essence of her being and _pulls_.

 

***

 

It is the second battle she wages today, but something altogether not martial. The fire fights her at every turn, threatening to consume her, or else sputter out altogether, until-

 

-Until she can feel her blood _ignite_ with something altogether new, and suddenly the world is a burst of bright red, and then darkness.


	8. Chapter 8

_The ash is soft. The ground beneath her face is rough stone – jagged, fire-tempered obsidian – but the ash is warm and comforting, like a cradle._

_Perhaps, even, an embrace._

_She stretches, rolling her shoulders through it – as if it were snow, it’s so deep – and curls in, enjoying the comfortable sensation. It’s soft, too, like snow if it were not bone-chilling, but instead exuded warmth, without the uncomfortable moistness, and she can feel gentle pull of the individual motes over her shoulders, down her spine, across her legs, as she moves._

_She’s… undressed?_

_‘Tis a strange dream, then._

_A welcome one, mind you. There are enough horrors in Lothric to haunt her sleep, undoubtedly, and enough in Astora to haunt her waking soul, it seems. But she’d have preferred something a bit more predictable, of course._

_That’s not to say comfortable nudity is beneath her, that is, but it **is** a tad bit unconventional, and now that she’s thinking about it she’s really second guessing the matter, and-_

_-and now there’s footsteps, and great, she’s not fucking opening her eyes now, that’s for sure._

_Two sets. One armored, she's fairly certain of it, while the other falls softer on the ash. Horace, please, wake me from whatever I’ve gotten myself into._

The pair murmur to themselves, amidst an argument of somekind, before a familiar voice cuts off the other to address the figure they've approached.

 

_Rise, if it would please you, Anri of Astora._

 

_Thou’rt not Horace._

_I am indeed, not Horace._

Anri groans. _Let me slumber in peace. I have no want of thee in my dreams, witch._

_You dream not._

_I was having a most excellent dream, until thou approached me and ruined ‘t._

_Your armor, if it would suit you. I shall leave you presently, then._

There is a harsh clanging of metal against stone, and the thump of steel's edge being deposited into soft ash, as Yuria deposits what she claims to be Anri's armor atop a nearby boulder and marches off in haste, leaving Anri and her companion behind.

 

Gods above. Stark naked before Londor’s Hierophant. A nightmare after all. Why has she not awoken?

 

Where is she?

 

The hard, stone-hewn floor of a chapel beneath her face – _the flame-sculped obsidian of Lordran’s kiln-_ the warmth of another body at her side – _she is cradled in ash -_

 

_-she arose from it._

 

Her eyes snap open, her whole body flinching, the languid stupor gone, the enchanting haze lifted from her mind, and she quickly brings her arm up to check, and it is _her own, at long last, it is her sword arm, and hers alone._

 

_She is alive._

_She is alive, curled atop what must have been an explosion of ash, and she is-_

_-she is alone._

There is no longer a voice from within, no twinned soul through whose eyes she may see the world, and she must _rise_ , she cannot lay here, she must know-

 

Anri quickly sits up.

 

The kiln is now blanketed by both darkness and ash, which looks like freshly fallen snow. Her armor lies in an unceremonious heap to her side atop a rock, where Yuria so thoughtfully discarded it before she left. It is, in fact, her armor. Presumably Yuria's pilgrim salvaged it from the Shrine of the Darkmoon.

 

Picked it from atop her corpse, upon which they so thoughtfully donned it.

 

Not one to fail to learn from unwelcome memories, she grasps the hilt of the nearest rusted blade and heaves, dislodging it with substantial effort from the stone, and in one fluid and adrenaline-fueled motion, swings it at the boulder. There is a violent crash, the blade shatters in three, and the impact reverberates through her shoulders, but the boulder remains staunchly solid, and she cannot help but feel encouraged.

 

That is, until there’s a cough from afar, all feigned politeness and underlying amusement, and then a polite but firm call.

_You might wish to dress yourself._

_See anything thou’rt fond of, Lady Yuria?_ She gives the broken sword a flourish for good measure, despite the twinge in her arm and deep, throbbing ache in her shoulder. The body is new, indeed. The musculature, at the very least, could use a bit of upkeep.

 

Anri’s a soldier. Nudity doesn’t faze her. The flushing of her cheeks is entirely due to the fact that Yuria damn well knows why she took the swing at that rock.

_We will have company, soon enough. T’would be best to be prepared._

She steps forward, stark naked, and stares straight down the slits of the priestess’ billed helm.

 

_Where is she?_

_Dress thyself. She is recovering, as thou did. She will likely not awaken for a while yet._

 

_Well enough then. But first, Lady Yuria, I would ask of thee a favor._

 

_Can the favor not wait until thy armor is once again donned?_

 

_I am afraid I must insist. I have been more than patient._

 

_Indeed, then. What would you ask of me?_

 

_Simply this. Please, remove thy helm. I wish to see thy face._

 

_A strange request, but I will honor it._

 

Anri smiles and drops the broken sword at her side as Yuria lifts the billed mask over her head, revealing a plain, age-worn face. Her nose is long and narrow, but Anri cares for none of her facial features. 

 

_Art thou now satisfied?_

 

Simply that her face is now accessible.

 

_No._

 

There's a resounding crack as Anri swings with her good arm, driving all her frustration and all the force her newly formed body can muster into a single solid punch to the nose. Yuria was right, she was right, but she  _killed_ her and it  _hurt_ and she's been so fucking smug about it ever since.

 

And now Anri has the upper hand.

 

She pulls back with blood on her knuckle.

 

_Now. Now I am satisfied._

 

Yuria coughs, clutching her nose.

 

_I shall don my armor now. Go do thy business, whatever it was. If you so much as lay a finger on her before she awakens, I will gut thee twice over._

 

_***_

 

Yuria's shadow, Anri discovers, was the Firekeeper, who followed her to the kiln in part to watch the flame die out and in part to be certain the women she cared for were not in needless harm put. Anri feels warm at the deliberate use of the plural.

 

The Firekeeper kneels by her side, helps her lace worn boots and buckle greaves with burn-scarred fingers. Her tiara, however, no longer complements her face, armoring herself against the shame of her scarred sockets, but is placed delicately as a band across her head, a glint of silver against gold. It is the first time Anri has seen the blue of her new eyes – a muted color, but with a faint light to it, the glimmer of excitement, of wonder, even amidst everything.

 

They suit her.

 

_My thanks to thee, for thy assistance._

_I…. it is no trouble, ashen one. It is good to see thee again as thyself._

_It is good to see thee in better spirits._

 

_Meaning thus changed?_

 

_No, I misspoke, but when she gave thee those eyes.... your countenance was_

 

_I find myself uplifted of late._

 

_How so?_

 

_Well,_

 

The Firekeeper gingerly rubs the pad of her thumb across the top of a buckle as Anri continues to braid her hair.

 

_I have, most recently, watched a strapping young woman deliver a well needed blow to someone who sorely deserved it. Oh, and, while it is perhaps improper of me to draw attention to it, she was also unclothed at the time._

 

Anri grins. 

 

_And then, two brave, incredibly dutiful knights sought a way to form a better world, and instead of giving up on a corrupt one, seemingly managed to fulfill what I saw a spark of in these new eyes of mine._

 

And she points, not to the armor-clad figure Anri can now just make out slumped in the distance (and her heart _stutters_ ), but up.

 

To the sky.

 

_Behold. The birth of thy new age._

_***_

_She is burning._

_She is burning, she is still burning, she is-_

 

At the center of an explosion of ash, a knight kneels, slumped against an ancient, fractured greatsword and a pile of rapidly cooling cinders.

 

It is over.

 

Her gloveless hand _burns_ and as she looks it over she can see, just below the surface, flickers of flame – not the stray embers, that would catch the fringe of her soul or cloak in the heat of battle before, as a champion of ash, but true flame, burning through her bloodstream.

 

Unexpected.

 

She lifts her hand to the sky, hoping to illuminate it with the rising darksign and catch a better glimpse of her veins and whatever strange phenomena this appears to be, but there is no darksign. It has burnt away entirely.

For the first time, she sees the sky as it is – not bright with the flame of the sun or clouded with the ash of its extinction, but with a million tiny points of glimmering light.

 

_Stars._

 

There will be hope, for all of them. Every lost soul, twinkling in the darkness.


	9. Chapter 9

The stars glitter, and a swell of pride and pain comes rushing through her chest, into her face and her eyes and her mouth as all the frustration and grief and energy she’s expended over the course of her life has finally proven worthwhile, and she laughs as a couple tears roll down her cheeks. It’s overwhelming – the catharsis, the stars, the relief, the terrifying, bone-deep exhaustion,  _is this what Anri felt? When we killed the Saint of the Deep?_

_Anri._

_Where is she?_

She turns to the rest of the kiln, to the field of broken iron and smoldering flowers, and gasps.

 

Before her stands a convocation, a congregation of pilgrims and hollows come to bear witness to the changing of the tides of the world, the process of the kindling of the flame, and, she has no doubt, thanks to Yuria’s hand in things, to her awakening, following her co-opting of it.

 

Yuria is there, just to the side of what might be the procession's head, amidst an ensemble of knights wearing the tell-tale heraldry of the Sable Church. The priest bows.

 

_Gracious Lord._

_Yuria-_

Yuria, not one to be interrupted on any count, interrupts her right back, but not without a quick flick of her chin, a telling gesture, answering the yet pronounced question.

 

_Make you make Londor whole._

The firekeeper stands where Yuria has pointed, starry-eyed at the cosmic scale of the proceedings, though skeptical of everyone’s intentions, based on the distance she appears to be trying to maintain from some of Yuria’s train. Yet there’s an armored gauntlet around her neck, she’s supporting someone, and they pull off their helmet and, _oh._

Gods, she’s sore. She’s beat to hell, pretty sure she’s got a couple bones still broken from that last fight, the flame really took a lot out of her, and she’s about ten steps from coughing up something that she’s three-quarters sure will be blood, but she’s running anyway across the kiln despite Yuria’s heavy-handed sigh because it’s _Anri._

She’s crying again. There’s thousands of people, they’re all staring at her, and she’s bawling her eyes out, because the woman she loves  - _whom she killed –_ is standing before her, but Anri is crying too, and it’s all she can do to cradle her face with her hands – one clad in hot metal, the other bare – and press her forehead against the other woman's to be certain she's not a trick of the light.

 

Anri’s blood burns the same as hers.

 

They’re such a mess. Covered in sweat, herself in blood, Anri – _is that ash? – it is, ask me not, I think I came from it – we can still speak thus? through our souls? – oh woe be unto Yuria – kiss me, Anri, I beg of thee-_

_-_ and Anri presses soft lips against her own split ones, slick and warm and _real._

 

The two of them, usurpers of flame, soulbound, proceed-

 

_To Londor, then?_

 

 

For whatever comes, they will take it, hand in hand.

 

***

 

Londor, it turns out, borders a vast body of water that stretches on ceaselessly, as far as the eye can see. The Sable Church stands at the center of the small city, dark stone amidst a sea of bright white structures – the only tall construction amidst the tiny homes built across the peninsular mountainside.

 

Anri and she walk astride, in the center of the procession.

 

She’s spotted a number of familiar faces. Irina and the Firekeeper chat, and Eygon makes idle conversation with a knight she recognizes not. Orbeck, too, walks with them, though the pilgrims give him a wide berth. 

 

She doesn’t see Karla.

 

The steps to the church must wind around the mountain, through the city streets at least three times over. Every window is open, every inhabitant, hollow, human, ash, or in-between, is staring – either at the massive winding procession of knights and priests, or the sky, their cries and screams resounding, their whispers echoing:

 

_A Lord of Londor has the Flame Usurp’d!_

_Velka herself has absolved us! The First Sin is no more!_

_Look to the sky – not sun, not flame, nor dark, but something altogether new! The Age of Flame has ended!_

_Here she comes! Champion of Ash, Lord of Londor!_

 

And occasionally, in the most hushed of tones, when they think they aren’t being overheard, _she has succeeded where Elfriede us forsook._

She tries not to pay it too much mind, but such attention is entirely foreign to her, and she has never seen so many _people_ in one place aside from the gatherings of those at the Cathedral of the Deep, who tried to murder her _._

 

Anri is not quite as unnerved.

 

_I grew up in a city, after all._

_Is Astora the same?_

_No, not at all. Far flatter, for one, and larger than this, with more structure to it. Stone brick, rather than white paint, and grandiose buildings. It had a more inflated sense of self. There was a certain emphasis on the construction of walls, as well, with everything cordoned off to its proper place. But it certainly was crowded, far more so than Lordran._

_How do they fit so many people in one place?_

_Lordran looked like this once too, I imagine. But,_ and she grips her hand tighter, the warmed metal joints of their gauntlets sliding together, _I will protect thee._

_Oh, I would be most grateful, esteemed knight of Astora. After all, I think I may have inadvertently come across a title of sorts as of late._

Anri laughs, and it’s a lovely sound, ringing through the city streets.

 

_Seriously, though. Promise me thou wilt protect me from Lady Yuria and her fearsome dispensary of titles._

_Oh, I still have several promises to thee to make good upon._

_Such as?_

_Well, for one, I never made it to Firelink, so I really ought to hold you down upon a stone floor and properly return the favor._

She flushes.

 

_I recall you mentioned you were fond of my witty tongue, so I do owe you a certain degree of use of that, and what’s more, I never did reward thee for coming to my rescue in Anor Londo._

_Anri, hush._

_Oh, let me have my fun._

_You have no obligation to me._

_Have you not realized, at this point, that this is less of an obligation towards thee and more earnest interest?_ Anri’s voice inside her head begins to drip with sarcasm. _Besides, thou’rt a **Lord** , now, and I am but a humble knight, sworn to thy fealty, I must showcase my duty to thee somehow, and how else am I to express my gratitude?_

_Oh, a Lord, am I?_

_Indeed! And a very fine lord, at that, with a very fine face, and very fine arms, and…_

She cannot tell what Anri trails off thinking about, but there is a melancholy glint to her eye, a sad affection.  

_And, what’s more, I must, of course, reward thee most handsomely for slaying the most loathsome monster to befoul the land. Repeatedly, of course. Several times over, for that._

_Well, brave knight, I would be most ungrateful to turn down such a generous offer._

_Indeed._

Anri’s thumb rubs against the inside of her wrist.

_But, I’m afraid, I cannot claim that bounty for myself alone._

_Oh?_

_You see, I had some assistance with that repugnant creature. I feel morally bound, by my sense of propriety and duty, you understand, to make sure my associate is properly… compensated._

_And just how do you plan to split such a… unique recompense?_

 

She smiles. _She will simply just have to wait and see._

_You ass!_

_I cannot physically wait to get my hands on thee._

_Thou’rt wounded, though. And are in need of a bath._

_What happened to ravishing me in celebration?_

_I’m watching thee favor thy left leg._

_I’m doing no such thing._

_Liar._

It’s not much longer before the crowd parts before the stone-hewn steps of the Sable Church. Priestesses in black garb attend to the travelers, giving food and directions, as well as addressing the urgent questions of excitable pilgrims. At Yuria’s instruction, most of the former inhabitants of Firelink are led to their respective chambers. It takes a stern look from a very exhausted Lord of Londor before she is even willing to acknowledge Orbeck’s presence.

 

_My Lord, you know why he is present._

_Orbeck is a friend, and has, again, given me no cause to doubt him, even given his prior affiliations. You, on the other hand, have given me frequent cause, and I still grant thee patience. I ask that you grant him the same hospitality you showed the others._

_I would know the purpose._

_If you mean for me to provide any meaningful governance, which the title seems to indicate, then I will certainly be in need of tutors._

_Certainly, though Londor can, of course, provide instruction._

_It will be embarrassing enough as is. I would have Orbeck instruct me in the basics, at least, if he is willing._

She looks over at the mage, who, Anri notices, is doing his best to appear disinterested in the current conversation, and far more interested in the masonry of the staircase.

 

_If you have want of me, and I might peruse the church library, I have nothing better to do. Besides, someone does have to keep you from making yourself look a fool._

_Thank you for your vote of confidence, Orbeck._

_Well, if that’s that, my Lord, I will have someone see you off to your chambers._

_Is there a washroom in the church, Yuria?_

_My Lord, your chambers have a washroom._

She gives a curt bow to Anri. _My Lord, someone will see you to your chambers as well._

_Oh, I was-_

_-was?_

_I had-_

_Anri is going to help me with my bath._

_There are servants for that, my Lord._

_I do not have need of them._

_You may tell them that, My Lord, but they have been waiting an age for you to break us free from the curse of flame, and will not be so easily lost. Sleep well. Tomorrow will be, I fear, rather busy, with preparations._

_Preparations for what?_

_While thy marriage bond was forged in Anor Londo, the age born from its union was not yet celebrated. Thus, thy coronation as Lord of Londor, and a ceremonial wedding, to reaffirm your bond._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Londor, here, is based loosely off of Patmos. The vibe of the Grotto of the Apocalypse has a very Londor vibe and thus makes sense for a church of (presumably) Velka that takes the form of Londor’s. Tiny and yet world-shakingly large at the same time.
> 
> Also, for people who are finding this fic not from my blog, hello! I started writing this a year ago because there was really nothing in the f!ashen one/anri tag, it's mostly done, I've just been slow on the editing due to what is, for all intents and purposes, basically a fake brain tumor (it's not actually a brain tumor, it just acts like one and produces the symptoms of one) and a bunch of weird medicines that make me really bad at spelling and reading, so just slow on the editing. There should be like, three? more chapters I think? Maybe four, depending on if I break one up. And then an epilogue, and possibly two bonus chapters, depending on how I'm feeling about them once I edit them.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter in particular starts to deal a bit more heavily with the ramifications of Anri's traumatic death, so: added a content warning for PTSD.

Two women in black cotton robes lead her through narrow stone corridors as the sounds of Anri’s complaints grow distant, stopping before a heavy stone door.

 

_My Lord, these are to be your quarters, if it would please you, for they are the most suitable within the Sable Church._

_I prithee, the formality is unnecessary. I will be satisfied if there is but a bed._

The younger of the two opens the door, revealing a small entryway, in which an attendant is dusting a side table. A wooden door on the right reveals an extravagantly large bedroom, complete with trappings she has till now only seen in Anor Londo – a four-poster bed, an equally elegant-looking chaise, a dressing table (in a _church_?), several decorative sculptures of some presumed religious significance, and a beautifully rendered portrait of a priestess. The other door, which the two women direct her towards, reveals a splendid sight – a massive tub made of dark grey stone, cut directly into the floor, brimming with steam.

 

The attendant knocks briefly before entering with a pile of folded fabric – off-white and deep brown cottons – and sets it down upon a bench by the entrance.

 

She pulls off her gauntlets, setting them aside, and moves to begin unbuckling her pauldron before she’s stopped by a pair of time-withered hands that grasp her own and pull the offending limb away. She looks into the older woman’s face in confusion, as the younger sister sets herself to the task of the pauldron.

 

_My Lord, allow us to aid you._

_I am capable._

_You are injured. Please, strain yourself no further._

The pair sheds her of her armor with surprising alacrity (or perhaps, she hates to admit it, they're _right_ ), and, like a wounded moth emerging from a battered cocoon, she finally steps out of her chausses.

 

Dressed only in burnt and bloodied leathers, well-worn boots, and the sad remnants of what surely must have been a tunic, she looks more a battered hollow than a Lord of Cinder, a Linker of Flame, the hero these people seem to see in her flame-charred armor – a small, pitiful, bleeding thing. Something tiny, happened to die a colossus.

 

The blood seeping from her side burns her skin, sparks of flame dancing from within. She will heal, in time. What power she took from the flame will grant her that, at least.

 

She will take this role with pride, then, in time. She took it with her own hands, after all.

 

The water is calling her.

 

It is awkward, how the pair strip her delicately like a noblewoman and gently usher her through the arched stone pillars towards the bath, how the girl’s eyes go wide at the sight of her scars and the other woman’s eyes seem to pierce right through her, unnerving and unwelcome, seeing something she’s not certain she wants the woman to know.

 

The bath, at least, is delightfully warm, and scented with a fragrance she cannot quite name.

 

_Jasmine, My Lord._

_Indeed? I’m afraid I am not worldly in the least. My experiences are limited to Lothric and its surrounding provinces alone._

The younger woman’s expression furrows as she pauses with the washcloth. _Truly?_

 

_Indeed._

_But, thou must be worldly indeed…._ The woman rubs a damp cloth across one of her prize-winning scars – a deep laceration across her lower ribs – and she restrains herself from sighing loudly, for she’s certain there’s no dirt on it, it’s merely an excuse to gawk.

_...For what kind of beast could be capable of leaving such a mark?_

_That of man._

She can taste the bitterness of her reply on her tongue. If they will not leave her in solitude, she will at least not conceal the true horror of the path that led her to them. This is a chapel to Velka, after all.

  

_My lord, forgive me._

The girl, who flinched at her words, averts her gaze downward, and she feels her stomach churn uneasily. She’s young, curious, and excitable, and that was unnecessarily cruel, even accounting for the memories now bubbling up of the sting of murky water in an open wound, a friend’s halberd across her side, empty eyes, hollow groans... fuck it. She’s young, and she’s not wrong about battle entirely, for there’s glory in some of it, she just happened to-

 

She gently raises the younger woman’s head from where it’s now firmly fixated on the bathwater to look her in the eye.

 

_You merely chose the wrong mark. Mark this one –_ and she twists to reveal a set of indentations, puncture wounds that once bit deeply into left shoulder blade – _‘twas from a stormdrake._

_A stormdrake? In Lothric?_

_‘Tis a long story, but indeed, and a very ancient one at that._

_What is thy name?_

_I…. Velka has taken it from me, as a penance. I hope to earn its return, soon._

The old woman looks up from where she’s hunched over her hair.

_Ach. Mind not the lass._

_Who informed thee of this?_

_The pardoners, of course, as is fitting, but it is of no import._

_Oh._

_If it is of interest to thee, I am at thy disposal, My Lord._

_No, of course, thy confessions are thine to share at thy will, but I found myself curious on the matter of taken names. It is not trouble to thee. I do have – ouch – a question for thee though._

_Of course, my lord!_

_What is it like, the Sable Church?_

_It’s a lovely place, My Lord. A peaceful home to many, salvation to some, sanctuary to others. In past, distressed, but patient, calm, and of late, filled with an undercurrent of tentative excitement. And now, abuzz with hope for progress._

_Distressed? For what?_

_The Church, My Lord, was founded by three sisters. Of late, there are left but two._

_Oh._

_Sister Liliane is more than any of us glad to see Sister Yuria to us return’d. She is a wonderful leader, but the work sits heavy on her alone, and the scribes as well, for her reports must be given in braille._

_Might I ask what became of the third?_

_It is not my place to say, My Lord, but Sister Yuria or Sister Liliane might speak more at length about it with you. It is true, though, that Elfriede’s loss weighs Londor down even tonight, on such an eve of celebration._

_Yes, I did hear mention-_

 

The three of them pause as the attendant outside raises her voice.

 

_I beg your pardon, My Lord, but you cannot be in here._

_On whose orders?_

_Sister Yuria-_

_Does Sister Yuria’s wishes surpass those of whose chamber it is?_

_Sister Yuria insists she is not to be disturbed_

_Well, I prithee ask thy Lord of Londor if my presence as her spouse is such a disruption._

She shifts in the bath, pulling her arms in from the grasp of the two women, turning to the younger of the two.

_Open the door._

_My Lord?_

_Please. Please open the door._

_H-_

She knew not how badly she needs, in this instant, to be alone, just to breathe. Londor is beautiful but overwhelming, and the crushing presence of every horror of Lothric lingers in all the corners, in the wide-eyed stare of the younger woman, Yuria’s puppeteering in the knowing firmness of the elder, and Anri’s voice behind the door tips the remaining breath out of her chest in an instant. The rush of thoughts in her head, mixed with the pain of the battle and the journey from the kiln and the flame are barely tamed with the notion that pulling apparent rank might buy her a night of respite, at the least.

_Ladies, might I make of you a request, in exchange for a favor?_

_My Lord, of course._

_Leave me be. I am fully capable of bathing myself, and I mean that as no slight to you. Anri can assist me if need be, and I can make certain that you are not reprimanded. And in exchange, I will share with you both the story of the battle with the stormdrake and many others besides, should you find them of interest._

 

_If that is earnestly thy will, My Lord, we will most certainly comply._

_It is._

The two woman rise and make their way to the door, unlocking it ( _it was locked?_ ) to reveal a familiar figure who has gingerly managed to interpose herself between the attendant and the door itself, hand on the handle, who takes advantage of the opening to dart quickly through the opening.

 

_Pardon me, ladies, excuse me._

_My Lord, I really must insist – Lady Yuria said-_

She raises her voice from the bath. _Anri and I have had not a moment to speak since the usurpation of the flame. She is perfectly welcome in my bathchamber, besides._

Anri turns and grins. She’s cleaned up herself, somewhat. Her hair is braided down her back, and she’s doffed her armor in favor of a spare linen tunic, though her straight sword hangs in a scabbard at her hip.

_We will leave you then, My Lord, as you’ve requested. Should you have need of anything, please call for us._

_My thanks._

The door closes slowly, grating against the stonework of the floor as it does. Anri waits a moment, and slowly makes to lock it behind them. There’s a brief pause, and she watches Anri’s gaze wander across the chamber, lingering across the corners of the room, the sparse decorations, the hearth, the stonework, before landing on her. There’s a flicker of unease in her eyes, she can see it there, as Anri’s eyes tarry those brief moments on the jutting arches of stone – one that doesn’t entirely vanish as she turns her attention away, towards the tub and her body.

 

Her thumb curls around the hilt of her sword, and she watches her slowly ease it an inch from the scabbard as Anri leans casually against the stone.

 

_Perfectly welcome in thy bathchamber, am I, My Lord?_

Behind her hip, where she either thinks or pretends she cannot see, Anri draws the edge of her blade, right above the hilt, against the corner of the stonework, just hard enough to leave a small mark.

 

Just hard enough to be certain the stone is solid.

 

The tension drains from her shoulders, and Anri breathes deeply, like a tight cord within her has finally untethered enough to allow her to finally inhale.

 

Thus unburdened, pretenses abandoned, she sheathes the blade and walks quickly to the steps of the bath, pulling the scabbard belt over her head to set it on the floor beside them before sitting on the step beside her.

 

She reaches a hand for Anri’s face, hot and wet, to brush a stray hair away from her forehead and see her properly for the first time since Irithyll.

 

The Hollowing’s gone from her neck, leaving only a faint scar, twisting branches up past her right ear where the darkness once climbed. Her eyes are just as bright, still tempered with a faint sense of unease if you know where to look, but they're  _hers_ and there's little sparks in them. 

 

Gods above, she's stunning. 

 

And right in the center of her face, forehead to nose, a deep, angry mark.

 

She traces the burning red line of it with her finger, leaving the scar damp.

 

_Come. I wish to see their work properly finished, at least._

_I can bathe myself._

_Just humor me, please?_

Anri is gentle _,_ all warm hands and strange floral soap. Her calluses are faint but present – like the trace of a memory – on the base of her fingers as she carefully grips her shoulders to drag the soap across her skin. She rubs her fingertips across a faint scar at the junction of her shoulder and neck – an arrowtip, one of many – and then follows the path to another to the right of her scapula, at the base of her neck, dipping her arm down into the water to follow the wind of old arrow-heads down her back, marks no longer visible to the naked eye, subsumed by larger scars.

 

Her fingers trace the path of her spine, and she inhales deeply at the touch. Anri’s sleeve is damp.

 

_Join me._ She is not above pleading.

A faint beam of light illuminates the room from the window above the bath – starlight – bathing Anri in a soft glow as she withdraws her arm to untie her trousers.

 

_I would- there is- I meant for-_

_This is not Firelink but-_

_I woke, naked in the ash, and have since only been able to think of thee **.**_

****

_Come, quickly-_

_Strain thyself not, no, do not rise, here-_

She grabs the wrist winding its way towards her shoulder.

_I have dragged mine own shambling corpse across the bridge of Lothric, and thou watch’d it. Trust me for five seconds that I can indulge myself instead of treating me like a simpering noble._

_I did not mean it thus._

_I know._

_I’m sorry._

_I know. I’m sorry too._

_This place scares me. I have lost family once. The pain of it killed me._

They will speak of it, then. Here in the heart of the world, in a dusty monastery dedicated to the goddess of Sin, she stares into Anri’s eyes and can read the pain in her soul, the silent confession, the fear.

 

She sees the spark of humanity, unshackled at last.

_I apologize for implying any lack of capability on thy part, because we both know thou art more than capable,_ and she laughs through the few tears that form in the corners of her eyes.

 

_I just fear Londor has instilled a paranoia in me, and it’s manifesting thus. And it helps not that both times I've lost everything, it's been to a saint of a heretical religious movement and within a run-down church. Thou'rt not Horace, and our bond is_ \- she inhales deeply, but quickly, her words rapid, rambling, even - _was, that is,_ _altogether entirely different, whatever gods may live forgive me for even **mentioning** him in this context, but he was even more shaken by what befell us in Astora than I, and it was my duty to hold things together for the both of us for a very long time, and I cannot but help think of him alone in the dark-_

_-and fear what may befall both of us alone in this place, while placing the burden squarely upon mine own shoulders._

 

Anri breathes, finally.  _Having a body again allows me to do that more literally, I think._

 

_Londor has instilled a paranoia within me of a different sort altogether._

 

_Of what sort?_

 

_I think of the Pontiff’s Dancer. Constantly. I see his footsteps echoed here, and I wonder if I've learned anything at all._

A damp hand brushes a wet lock of hair from her forehead, and Anri stares intently at her face.

 

_I’d never let harm of that sort befall thee here. I swear it. I spoke partially in jest before, as we made our way into this place, but on my honor, as a Knight of Astora, until my soul withers into mere ash, I will not let them play thee like a puppet._

_But I do intend_ – Anri’s breath is hot against her mouth, her lips brushing against her own – _to play thee –_ and there’s a rustle of fabric as Anri fumbles with her trousers, pulling them down the rest of the way.

Anri moves to rise but she cannot bear to release her fellow knight yet, and, wraps her wet hand in the front of the tunic, keeping their foreheads pressed together. Anri smiles and she can feel the grin, the soft dimples of her cheeks, as she covers the hand with one of her own, pressing it against the damp fabric and the heated skin beneath, and then Anri’s mouth is _finally_ against her own, hot and spit-slick and urgent.

Divest of her trousers, Anri rises from the steps, moving her other arm to wind her fingers into half-washed hair. Long legs move through steam and hot water to straddle her, and she groans, running her free palm up Anri’s thigh, feeling the thick cords of muscle she remembers beneath the skin, pulling her body tightly against her own, and she’s rewarded with a soft groan in return.

 

Anri’s tunic is utterly ruined, completely soaked.

 

But the wet fabric flows beautifully in the water,

 

_I recall a favor I owe thee._

She groans, grinding her hips up into Anri’s thigh, and Anri pants in turn, pushing against her hip.

 

_No favors – there, lower – I would see us, I would see us started on equal ground here._

_That’s – Indeed, generous of thee- mmm-_

_-No, harder, please, righ- yes, there – I just simply cannot bring myself to suggest we move._

_Oh, well,_ and Anri shivers as she moans those words into her collarbone, _that sounds nice._

 

And they move slowly, for they finally have the luxury of time.

 

***

 

The water in the bath has gone cold by the time they rise.

 

It has also gotten all over the floor, which she feels quite badly about.

 

Anri, finally discarding the waterlogged garment with a melodramatic flourish, sits her down to unfold the pile the attendant brought and immediately purloins her tunic.

 

_There’ll be another for thee in the other chamber, I assume. And some of those require bandages anyway, so be still._

She sits, dressed in borrowed trousers, as Anri patches her up in a warm and comfortable silence.

 

It is only then that she realizes how _exhausted_ she truly is.

 

The women, thankfully, have done their job well and rid the pair of them of the attendant. Anri is correct – the wardrobe is full of clean clothing, neatly folded, and she throws on a tunic, if only to keep her wet hair from the bandages atop her upper back until she can tie it up.

 

_I don’t think I’ve seen a bedchamber this ornate in person._

_Myself, only in Irithyll, Anor Londo, and perhaps-_

_-oh, Lothric?_

_Indeed, the same, if we count that of the Princes._

_None too restful, though._

_Who do you think it belonged to? Solemn churches rarely seem the type for superficial trappings._

_They have, but they rarely remain solemn after that._

_I see thy point._

_Still, I concede. This isn’t the Church of the Deep._

Anri steps into the room, towards the portrait of the priestess. _Her countenance well resembles Yuria’s. Perhaps her mother’s chambers?_

_When did she permit thee the pleasure to gaze upon her countenance?_

_I must not have informed thee, but it was of late._

_Indeed?_

_After I awoke. She removed her helm for the sake of mine own satisfaction._

_And? Did she grant thee... thus... thy... -_ she snorts, and Anri just shakes her head, desperately trying to restrain a laught.  _Thy satisfaction?_

_Unfortunately, I saw but a glimpse of her countenance before it was bloodied, so I cannot say for certain how far off the relation might be._

_I ought to admonish thee._

_Wherefore?_

_For denying me the shared.... the shared satisfaction -_  another snort -  _of observing the look upon her face._

_Nonsense. Our souls are still twinned, are they not? The moment is well-preserved within my memories, and I daresay it shall remain thus for the rest of my life. We shall find a way for thee to witness it firsthand._

_The priestesses mentioned a third sister._

_Hmm._

_A wayward one._

 

_My quarters are down the hall, and are perhaps more akin to what we’re both used to._

_It’s somewhat disturbing, I agree. Perhaps that’s better_

Anri rubs the back of her neck, averting her gaze towards the door. _There’s just too much statuary._ _It unnerves me, after everything._

 

_No need to explain now. I agree. Thy quarters, tonight, then. And we ought to sleep properly, once we get there._

_Shall we?_

_Well, first, I was thinking we ought to redecorate._

Anri just shakes her head.

 

_Just a touch._

_Yuria’s going to regret ever opening her damn mouth in our directions._

_Hey, if she wanted us to play nice, she shouldn’t have had you murdered in your sleep. I think she can handle a dustbin._

_Oh no, actually, I’ve just decided that’s not what we’re doing at all._

_Oh?_

Anri pulls out her straight sword, grinning wildly.

 

_Spar with me?_

_Oh? With thee? In my bedroom?_

_Indeed, in thy bedroom, though really, thou ought to be resting, given thy wounds, at this hour, where we ought both be sleeping, across these grotesque-looking sculptures that I feel as if I might clumsily strike out at._

_Pass me my blade, then. How can I resist such a winsome and practical offer?_

It is then that they first cross blades – not as strangers, nor on the Road of Sacrifices, one a wandering Hollow having sworn off her sword at the curse’s first sign, nor in the Smoldering Lake over the rotten body of Horace the Hushed, but in a dusty church bedroom illuminated by faint shafts of starlight, play-acting at mock-battle as they smash painful memories along with crumbling, hideous sculptures.


	11. Chapter 11

She wakes to the short rap of impatient but polite knocks on the chamber door, to the bright light of an already-risen sun shining through the curtains that neither of the two of them thought to draw the evening before. They’ve slept in, it seems.

 

Anri’s room is cozy, far more befitting of a monastery. The bed is comfortable, just big enough to fit the both of them, and the room boasts a small desk and chair besides, as well as a modest closet.

 

Resisting the impulse to curl into the slowly stirring body at her side, she extricates herself from Anri’s embrace and, still finding her morning bearings, makes her way to the door of the chamber. Two figures stand at attention – an impatient-looking priestess dressed in the dark robes she’d seen the previous evening and a knight in ornate but uniform breastplate and helm, a rapier at her side with a beautifully filigreed hilt, and an arm raised towards the door, mid-motion.

 

The hall behind the both of them is a bustle of activity. Priestesses murmur excitedly to each other as they move quickly through the halls. There, an older gentleman dressed in pilgrim’s apparel hunches over, adorning a small shrine with fresh flowers, lighting candles. Behind him, several priestesses unwind a long garland above the windows leading to the courtyard, affixing it to the arch.   

 

The knight speaks first, pitched voice echoing through her closed helm.

 

_My Lord, we’ve been sent to find you both. I have been instructed to show Ser Anri to the armory. Her ceremonial plate needs fitting._

The priestess steps forward, giving a curt bow. _Likewise, My Lord, I am to see you to your chambers, for your garb likewise needs fitting and tailoring besides._

_Oh. I apologize to you both, then, that we were not in my chambers._

The knight shrugs.

 

_I’ll just wake her, then._

It would be impolite to close the door in their faces, she supposes, though she longs to do so regardless.

 

Neither of them sleeps soundly. To do so in Lothric, even in what seemingly safe alcoves a knight might find by the light of flame, would be a death sentence. Thus, as hard as she tried to refrain from disturbing her, she’s certain Anri stirred when she arose from the bed, if not from the knocking.

 

But Anri lies abed still, draped half under a thick woolen blanket, tunic riding up just over her hipbone. Her sword arm is now wrapped over the top of the blanket instead of curled around her, bare skin in the sunlight.

 

Her eyes stay firmly shut, though the lids flutter as she approaches with the focus of it.

 

She kneels by the head of the bed, gently resting her hand atop the other woman’s.

 

_Arise, fair knight. Thou’ve armor to be fitted for, apparently._

_Mmm._

Anri’s fingers lace together with her own, and her eyes slowly open halfway to reveal a somewhat dubious expression.

 

_Is this a perk, or a drawback?_

_Only one way to find out._

_I suppose so, though if Yuria wants to buy me off, she’s off to an excellent start._

She laughs at that, and it brings such a lovely smile to Anri’s face.

 

_Seriously, I was buried in my last kit, and I got that when I was knighted. It’s at least several cycles old – hundreds of years – and I’m in dire need of replacement._

_***_

_So explain to me this, Ser-?_

_Ser Howe._

_Howe, then. What need has Londor for knights, isolated as it is from other settlements?_

_What need has any city? Defense, primarily. What if we were attacked?_

_The other cities could have cared less, honestly. Astora certainly didn’t register thy presence._

_As far as I understood’t, Londor feared less the assault of fellow men, and more of the supernatural and the divine._

_The Lords of Cinder, then?_

_Perhaps. But also, Astora may be a city of men, in which they dwell and make their day to day routine, but Londor is a City of Man that sought to bring about a new age of their making, distinct from the gods’ flame. In the past, Velka only knows that’s ended with divine retribution._

_You really think so?_

_Consider Oolacile._

_Manus’ overtaking of the city, we now know, was due to men’s own curiosity in probing the body of the pygmy. Had they simply foregone that, they’d have spared themselves the fate._

_Yet Artorias’ ordered assault of the city was divine retribution. Consider New Londo._

_The-_

_Gwyn ordered the city purged, thousands of innocents slaughtered, simply for the rebellion. Velka ensured we would have the capacity to fight back._

_I see thy point._

The armory stands on the outskirts of the monastery, a small building that overlooks the cliff and the crashing waves below. A small training ground stands before it, well fitted and maintained, though devoid of morning practitioners.

 

_Today leaves little time for sparring._

The interior is comfortably familiar, wood and stone, racks of steel and iron, the smell of oil and polish and the lingering scent of old sweat that’s seeped into the furniture. The knight wasn’t lying, they’ve got a sizable forge off to the side, half out the back, for standard repairs – she hasn’t seen a place equipped like this since Astora. A couple folks are getting the coals lit, and she’s pleased to see Andre’s one of them. He grins up at her as he changes out the oil in the quench tank.

_Let’s get you right kitted up then. I got a glimpse of it, seems the right height at least._

There are a couple adjustments, it turns out. She’s pleasantly surprised height isn’t an issue, though the plate wasn’t originally fitted for someone with a bust. The rest of the pieces – and there are _many_ , the gorget alone is _three_ – only require minor adjustments here and there.

 

The set itself is gorgeous. Deep, silvery black tabard with just a hint of shimmer, pitch-dark titanite plate absolutely _covered_ with gold and platinum filigree, and a shorter crimson mantle worn around the waist. The filigree is astounding in its craftsmanship, depicting crows moving across star-filled skies.

 

It’s clearly not meant for battle, it’s a piece of extravagance, but it’s also truly a work of art, and a finely crafted one at that. Part of her longs to put it through the paces, just to see if it holds up. It’s titanite – it almost certainly will, too, the workmanship is exquisite.

 

It’s as if she’s back on the day she finally earned her commission, holding her own blade for the first time, staring at Horace with a mixture of delight and pride and-

 

-fear.

 

She can’t help but notice how the red silk lining begins at the scar just below her nose. Right below the scar, choking her throat, lining the tabard, the trousers, spilling through to the overgarment.

 

It’s beautiful, but it’s deliberate. And she’s privy to the memories, because confusingly enough, they belong to her as well.

 

The eyes that opened on that body in the Darkmoon chapel – she saw through them. That first glimpse is equally hers by right of experience.

 

Her train of thought is jarringly interrupted by the sound of the door slamming into the wall hard enough to crack one of the hinges without the seeming impact of boot or arm against the wood. A young woman, brimming with barely-restrained energy begins quickly speaking as soon as she has entered the room, taking rapid advantage of the silence she has caused while pocketing a small talisman.

 

_Pardon, I am betrayed by mine excitement. How fares the fitting?_

 

She looks to be a near match for Yuria’s aspect – half a head shorter, but looking at least a half decade her junior if not more, dressed in priestess’ garb with her hair blown slightly askew.

 

_Are you Sister Liliane, then?_

_Ser Anri of Astora, I presume! I’m honored to make thy acquaintance. Is the armor to thy liking?_

_Myself thine as well, and most certainly – it is a fine piece of craftsmanship._

_I am certain it shall become thee as if it were made for thee. How fortunate that I was able to catch thee, then! I wanted to speak with thee a spell, since thou art but newly healed, and ask thee – thou’ve noticed no ill effects of thy resurrection, to be certain?_

_Oh._

_I am a healer, Ser Anri, and-_

_No, I am well glad enough to be back among the embodied, thank you. No complaints from me._

_-and as it was I who fine-tuned the theory of the matter, I wished to ensure thy well-being._

_Consider it ensured._

_Thou’ve no strange markings, then?_

_Only the scar from the blade, but-_

_-oh, that’s to be expected, never mind that one, I was referring more to expressions of the Darksign, or blotches of humanity, or-_

_-Sister Liliane, can thou not mark the scar thyself?_

_Ser Anri, did my sister not mention my blindness to thee?_

_She spoke very little of thee, actually._

_Then, I apologize, but no, I’m afraid I cannot mark it myself. Now, as I was saying, the scar from the blade of avowal marks the success of the binding of souls, and thus is no concern to us._

_My apologies, Liliane, for my rudeness._

_Think not on ‘t. I am too impassioned by our success with thee here!_

_I am impressed, though, from what I have heard of thee._

_And what is that?_

_That thou’ve developed miracles to bolster swordsmanship with Dark. One needs have substantial interest in swordplay to revolutionize it, and to do so without sight is commendable._

_Hmm. Regardless, I suspect thy fellow shall be busy much of the day, for her garb requires tailoring and fitting and the like with her present, unlike thyself._ She lands the final syllable as Anri doffs a piece of the breastplate, passing it over to one of the smiths with a hefty clatter that's barely muffled by a polishing rag.

_I was hoping thou would’st permit me to give thee a tour of the Church in the meanwhile, for I have heard tales of thee from Yuria, but wished earnestly to meet thee proper._

_I will swap stories for thy own then._

_Of course._

It isn’t until the pair of them finally exits into the courtyard and the early afternoon mist – the sea has brought faint cloud cover, a swift but warm breeze, and Liliane leads them around the walls first, Anri’s certain she’s trying to avoid attention as much as she is – that Anri dares broach the subject.

 

_Tell me of thy sisters._

_Ah. Which sister intrigues thee the more, then? The unfaltering servant, who will readily use others if she can justify ‘t, but who’s commendable work has saved us all even as she has killed many, or the unwilling martyr whose room you defiled last night?_

_I assume Yuria’s single-mindedness developed in part from thy sister’s…. loss?_

_Her betrayal. It was a betrayal._

_Ah._

_Yuria disagrees._

_How so?_

_She considers Elfriede’s betrayal a mere failure, a weakness of character. I recognize it as an active decision on Elfriede’s part._

_So she was ash, then? She rekindled the flame, in spite of thy mission?_

_No. She forsook our world entirely. Fled it to safeguard another, supposedly, in service to Velka, or so her second claims. Yuria would have had him killed._

She scoffs.

 

_Friede was kind enough, or perhaps cruel enough, to send him to inform us that she’d already departed._

 

_And you had none to match her knight?_

_Elfriede studied pyromancies. She was skilled in soul transpositions. The blade that pierced thy skull was her design, finalized by Yuria and myself, of course, but he wielded its precursor – a blade with a piece of her soul within it._

_Yuria must have been incensed._

_Thy mistake, Knight, is in assuming Yuria is the one with the temper in this family._

_Elfriede’s affront to Yuria was a sin against Velka, and the church, and the bright future that thy suffering has brought about for us._

_Elfriede was everything to me. That she could so easily turn her back upon us, abandon our family – was that not a sin in itself? That is no mere weakness of character, a failure to do what must be done. That’s betrayal, Ser Anri. She was my sister, my guiding flame. I loved her more dearly than any other, and that she grew to sicken to us so greatly that she could not even deign to look me in the eye and tell me herself that she would not return pierced my soul irreparably._

_I am sorry for thy loss, Sister Liliane._

_I fought Sir Vilhelm myself, and he had not even the honor to duel me properly. I’ve developed many a miracle, and unfortunately, while I am subject to my own Vow of Silence that he turned against me, the soul-transposed blade she gave him was not._

_I wish to speak no more on the matter for the moment. It frustrates me too much. But now, you understand more of Yuria’s secrecy._

_Did he inform you as to what led to her betrayal?_

_She sought to link the flame._

_That’s… not what I expected, coming from someone who grew up in Londor._

_Perhaps it was her will to link it with Blackflame. I know not, for she explained nothing. I’m not certain, Knight Anri, that I even care. Whatever befell her, it worked not, and she sent her fellow to insult me after the fact to inform me that she wouldn’t even come home to say goodbye herself, for she’d found some other calling._

_That’s quite a change in behavior._

_Yuria thinks she was too weak to sacrifice her fellow._

_Oh._

_It’s why she didn’t tell your ashen one the details of the wedding before the fact._

Liliane shakes her head. _I disagree._

_Do you?_

_He’d have gladly died for her, though she’d not have asked it of him. No, she was done with us. She simply didn’t give a shit._

_We humans are imperfect creatures, Ser Anri. We all like to think ourselves saints, though within each of us lies a seed of hypocrisy. I know this the best of the three of us, for I’ve been marked a heretic._

_I am a miracle user, but my spells are heresies, and indeed, some can be twisted for cruel applications. I like to think myself a sympathetic fellow to the burden of the hollows, but I at least have the self-consciousness to recognize my fascination borders on an unhealthy preoccupation – a senseless mania, an unfeeling fixation on the suffering of others._

_My obsession with their pain, and our role in curing it, does not redeem me of the pain I impose on others. Vilhelm's use of my miracle hammered that lesson deep within mine own soul as his blade pierced my flesh. And although we serve Velka here, faithfully upholding her will in maintaining the natural progression of the world that Lord Gwyn sought to impede, my faith and faithlessness alike leaves me a heretic drenched in hypocrisy._

_Likewise, Yuria’s single-minded nature nearly cost us thy fellow’s trust. She garners strength in distancing herself from those around her, and accomplished her mission with ardor and vigor, but the heartlessness of her deception was not lost on myself. All because she’s too weak to admit Friede left us willingly, had the strength she feigns._

_So what was thy role in this charade, then, if Yuria’s was to seek Elfriede’s successor and send assassins for their second, and Elfriede’s was to quench the blade to bind their souls?_

_To shepherd the church of Londor, and lead the pilgrims who would seek a true death in Londor or else draw the attention of a kindhearted soul. I heard it was Yoel who drew the dark sigil from within her. He was a good man._

_And what’s to be gained from insinuating thyself into my good graces now, then, if I’m interpreting thy aim correctly here?_

_If friendship is too naïve an answer, perhaps a greater political unity for Londor will satisfy thee. While I am finally free of my partial burden of figurehead, that burden has been placed upon thee and thy spouse, though I for the moment retain organization of internal affairs, infrastructure, education, among religious matters that I suspect are of limited concern to thee. Is it so bad to wish to lay the groundwork for peaceful collaboration, particularly given thy turbulent history with my sister?_

_I mean not to question thy intent, but I have learned a healthy dose of skepticism is prudent when dealing with political clergy after thy sister, and not to mention the Cathedral of the Deep. You understand, do you not?_

_Of course. And, Ser Anri, it is my turn to ask of thee a story._

_It is only fair, Sister Liliane. What would you ask of me?_

_I have heard some of how thou became a knight of Astora. The suffering of those who became hollows interests me greatly. I would’st hear how thee escaped the fiend Aldrich, and swore thy vengeance._

_Sister, that’s not a-_

_-I spoke to thee of my sister’s betrayal._

_Very well, then. I was a child._

She was a child. There were rumors in the streets – other kids going missing left and right, being snatched up by the archdeacons, orphanages emptied out, all for a bit of coin supposedly to feed the ones they could make room for. There was never any more food, and there were none left to feed. She’d thought about sneaking out, but the streets were merciless – the guard were worse than the caretakers. All they could do was pray they wouldn’t get-

 

-a knock on the door in the middle of the knight, and she jolts, the half asleep stupor she lay in vanishes in an instant, turning over with quiet alacrity in the bed she shared with Horace to put a hand over his mouth and rustle his hair, they’ve got to get up, to go, to hide, but there is nowhere to run that the priests do not watch – the streets are well guarded.

 

The pair of them climb up the creaking rafters, hand over hand, desperately clinging to the beams of the ceiling and each other. They watch it all, because they have to – if the priests notice them, if they cough, if they cannot restrain the scream that threatens to claw its way out of their lungs, then they are as dead as their friends.

 

It is not until this moment that they are all friends.

 

The others are not so lucky. Two resist to the point where she’s certain the priests have killed them, blood streaking from their skulls, though they laugh and grumble. He wants them alive. He wants them alive, and it’s all she can do to clench her jaw and plug her ears and desperately try not to give the pair of them away by vomiting at the implication.

_They- the priests came to purge our orphanage, round us all up to drag to Irithyll and be fed to the Saint. Horace and I hid in the rafters. Stayed silent for about two hours as they rounded up the screaming others and tried to find us, left a false trail out the window. We were forgotten, eventually._

 

They hit trouble once they were out on the streets, years down the line. She got caught – an executioner she’d bribed to sell them a little spare food tried to sell her out to a priest, whilst they were still just young enough to be forgettable. Unmissed. Horace caught up with her just in time, the man had her pinned against the wall, when he managed to loose his halberd and jam it through the man’s spine, spraying gore across the both of them, for he’d doffed his armor, and they took it and ran, no mind for food-

 

How did they survive?

How passing strange that she’d earned a commission, earned the right to serve as ash. More fodder. A different kind. 

 

But it had gotten them their vengeance. And it was never really about the flame. Not for them.

_Such purges were commonplace, in that age?_

_Ubiquitous, by that point._

The heavy smell of salt in the air is grounding.

_So what is this small chapel, then?_

They’ve moved past the exterior walls of the main monetary to a small chapel outside of them, built into a pre-existing cave within the cliffs above the sea.

_The original grotto, Ser Anri, where we three came together, and conceived of our ordinance. I know thou wish not for a theological lecture, so I will spare thee the sermon._

_I thank thee for that, at least. Is there a short version?_

_We were so perfectly balanced, as few are in this world, at the epicenter of a great cosmic understanding, that I suspect our souls are linked somehow._

_That’s manic. My thanks for thy brevity, at least._

_Thou’rt welcome!_

_Can I ask thee an ill-mannered question, Liliane?_

_Certainly, if you mind not the possibility of my taking offense to thy inquiry._

_How old wert thou, when thou died the first time?_

_Oh. I assumed I would have to chide thee for other lines of question. I was just shy of my second decade, I believe._

_That young?_

_Indeed. Londor was young when we first moved to act. I received my visions from Velka as a child, and the Sword of Avowal was completed by my fifteenth birthday._

_Wait, so that means-_

_-Sir Vilhelm was the first to slaughter me, yes._

_Gwyn’s ass. I thought my childhood was fucked._

_From what I myself have heard, from thee and from rumor alike, to speak thus is not untrue._

_No, you’re right, it certainly was. And pardon my tongue, I certainly ought not swear so much before a sister of the cloth._

_And I ought to get return to my duties, as there’s much to do before the morrow. I shall speak with thee later, Ser Anri._

_My thanks for the tour, Sister Liliane._

_She will likely have thy fellow engaged for much of the afternoon, unfortunately, but, in better tidings, Londor is more lively than it’s been in ages._

Anri nods, and moves to leave her.

 

_Ser Anri?_

_Yes?_

_Who killed thee, first?_

She will not. She cannot.

 

_That’s a question for when your duties do not beg your attention, sister._

***

_What exactly is the purpose of this –_ she presses her lips together, trying desperately to recover her focus in the midst of this unfamiliarity as hands swarm around her, drawing tight pieces of cord around her biceps, across the length of her clavicle, pinning her from shoulder to wrist – _this ceremony tomorrow? You mentioned a celebration of the new age?_

_Indeed! A commemoration, of course, of thy usurpation of the flame, to take place as day’s light fades and the newly-visible stars once again reveal their celestial presence to us. A festival, for all of Londor to behold, but also, a celebration of thy wedding._

_My wedding? That was not a celebratory affair, to say the least._

The tailor tilts her head skeptically.

 

_A better one, to celebrate the great child that was born of it – the new age – and to commemorate the first of man, for while marriages have been a noble union, **thy** wedding ritual, the soul-union, is a practice till this age unattempted by man._

_Is that common knowledge around these parts, or does my lack of education betray me?_

_Common knowledge is a relative term, my Lord, and this is indeed Londor._

_I suppose I can excuse the formality, then. Do you sincerely need all these measurements?_

_We do, my Lord._

_What in the world are they all for?_

_We must be certain how far we’ll have to take in all the seams on thy garb, for Sister Yuria gave us approximate measurements to work with, which were indeed quite excellent, but approximations, of course._

_Just my garb?_

_Ser Anri’s armor is more traditional, as her role as your spouse has been accounted for since the founding of the church, and thus, there is ceremonial armor that she is undoubtedly being fitted for as we speak._

_And my role was not?_

_Sister Yuria thought it would be fitting to dress you in something more befitting of you._

_More fitting than armor?_

One of the other tailors, a woman with one callused hand holding a notched length of cord around her own and the other pulling a quill from between chapped lips to mark down its circumference interjects – _Symbolic, that is._

She turns to a pair of the others. _‘T’s the last of this set. I’ll get the next round started if you lot want to start pinning._

The woman moves to the bundle laid out on the bed, and begins removing a series of beautifully crafted undergarments – blessedly plain, nothing excessively ornamental, but of fine make and craftsmanship.

 

She’s seen corsets before, obviously. Probably. Well, in paintings. She’s just never worn one. It is rather beautiful, though.

 

The two women lace her into it. She stares across at herself in the mirror, plain cotton breeches and silver-white brocade, paired with the fading remnants of bruises peeking out from battle and bath alike.

 

There’s a knock at the chamber door, but as one of the tailors turns to answer, it's already swung open.

 

Her first thought is that this truly must be a new age, because if someone had asked her previously the circumstances under which she and Yuria of Londor would first have proper glimpses of one another – Yuria sans helm, herself sans weapon at the ready, or clothing at all, to be specific – this would not have been those she’d have thought of.

 

Yuria stands there, a hint of something sheepish in the way she breaks eye contact to stare at the tailor’s equipment. Her face holds to Anri’s description, marked by an impressive bruise across the bridge of her nose, dark purple with the hint of green that suggests she’s had it partially healed by a cleric in the meanwhile. She’s not concealing it, however.

 

_Slept thee well, my Lord?_

Her tone is thin, not malicious, but not sycophantic either. Perhaps she did not sleep much either.

_As well as I could, Yuria, all things considered._

_Have they shown thee the gown yet?_

_No, but they did mention thy hand in it._

_A partial hand, but as I knew thee, I was able to suggest details as the design was being conceived that encompassed a personal touch in addition to a purely symbolic one. It was a collaborative effort. Liliane is far more versed in the intricacies of public image and aesthetic symbolism than I._

_She is a holy woman, as I recall._

_She is, above all, a storyteller._

The tailors, their final measurements taken, graciously bow as if to interrupt. _My Lord, Sister Yuria, we will take our leave to finish the pinning._

Yuria nods.

 

_How did you help design it while in Lothric with us?_

_I sent letters, as did Liliane. Sketches and the like, for the tailors to describe to her, and she likewise dictated for them to return to me._

_I ought to commend thee, apparently, on thy relatively correct assessment of my proportions._

_Oh, that’s convenient for all of us. Excellent._

_Alas, you have overestimated how broad my shoulders are just a hair, but that seems to be thy only major error._

_It’s thy armor, I suspect. Or the shrine's ill lighting._

She leans against the bedpost, debating where to go from here, sifting through the myriad of unspoken questions.

 

_Yuria, what do you mean when you speak of a personal touch in the design?_

_Oh. I simply noted that you seemed to hold – whether as an inspiration or as a care – the Wolf Knight in thy high regard. You still wield what was once his blade, even now._

_I do._

_I suggested to Liliane that it was worth paying homage to that as well, since you will be bereft of your armor._

_That’s surprisingly thoughtful of thee._

_For someone you still blame for tricking you into the brutal murder of thy fellow, you mean?_

_Oh, are we to have this conversation now, then?_

_Is there a conversation to be had? I thought we said our parts on the matter._

_I’m not certain, to be honest. But there is something I wanted to say to thee relating to the subject._

Yuria scoffs, turning her head towards the door. She’s not certain what the other woman was hoping for here – this whole conversation is strange, she’s running off of entirely too little sleep for far too long for this, but now she’s frustrated, all of this crosses the familiar boundary of aloof philosophy to a realm of entirely unfamiliar intent, for some  _fucking_ reason people keep staring at her like she holds the power in the room, so by the gods, she will _draw a line_.

Her own way. Two can play at disarming displays of unexpected grace.

_I do wish to apologize to thee for the state we left this room in this morning._

_Do you?_

_I do not, however, begrudge Anri her frustration over your callous treatment of her. And we really ought to speak of it, since we have a minute to ourselves, before I agree to participate in any other ceremony._

_We are of a similar mind on many things, Yuria, but the method you chose to convince me of it nearly turned me from the idea entirely. I know we spoke on that substantially, but in case it isn’t already clear to you, scholarly as you are, every instance you echo Aldrich beyond that is one step Anri takes out of this church, and one step I take towards following her._

_Thy knight, My Lord, has demonstrated merely two qualities to me: she has commendable taste in companions, and poor enough strength of character to be lured to her death._

_Yuria, you are being criminally unfair._

_Let me speak, just for a moment._

_Speak, then._

_I train the knights who fight under the banner of the Sable Church, My Lord. I have been undead for cycles – many ages. How many knights do you think I have seen die, as thy fellow has? To live, to survive, without losing my mind to the curse of hollowing means I have necessitated spotting such weakness and tempering myself to the inevitable pain of its loss._

She does not dignify that with a response.

 

_How many do you think I have set up to be-_

_Enough._

_You have proven yourself strong enough to weather not only the trials of Lothric, but have done so without losing thy sanity to the darkness._

_She has kept me going, well enough._

_Maybe so. The same cannot be said for her. That is all._

_Have you spoken to her properly, for more than a cutting remark? Do you know more than a passing rumor about her?_

_You have made your point, My Lord._

_Perhaps you ought to ask._

_You might be able to fill me in._

_No, I think you ought to speak with her about this. Consider it a formal request, for whatever that’s worth within whatever political hierarchy I seem to fit into._

_***_

 

The tailors return, eventually, hooking her into a strange system of belts and structured skirts that Yuria assures her with a hand-wave do, _in fact, go under the gown,_ as a couple others bustle around over a large piece of mostly-pinned fabric.

_Can I ask thee a question?_

_Certainly._

_We puzzled over the painting there last evening. She bears a striking resemblance to thee. Is she thy mother?_

_No, it is a portrait of my sister, Elfriede._

There is a palpable silence as the rustle of cloth pauses at mention of the name. Half the eyes are trained firmly on Yuria, waiting for a reaction, while the other half are glued to the Ashen One, incredulous. She stares at Yuria’s face, watching the other woman remark the portrait with a wistful melancholy.

 

There’s pride there, too.

_I have-_

_-yes, I’m certain you’ve heard whispers. If you long for the sordid tale, Liliane will undoubtedly spin you a winding yarn._

_What’s the short version of it?_

_She was but a poor wench turned to ash, who would abandon Londor. Her soul could not bear thy burden, nor had it the strength to kindle the flame._

_She has a kind face._

_My Lord –_ and _oh_ , is that-

 

_Ah, here, let’s see how thy wedding garb has come to fruition in mine absence._

_***_

Anri is bored.

_I miss thee._

The bustle of the city is intoxicating in its familiarity and strange novelty. Londor is nothing like Astora – it’s all white paint and tiered stairs and hills and tight turns and winding streets with twists that make no logical sense, but the hustle and bustle is the same – the smell of sweat and livestock and piss, the sounds of mingled conversation and hurried footfalls against the cobblestones and the groans of wooden wheels ferrying overloaded carts from here to there.

 

She feels so small again, lost in the crowd. 

 

Her fingers twitch to her side every so often – not for a blade, though that happens the first couple times she gets knocked about by foot traffic, but for her pocket. A small hand, perhaps? A smooth stone.

 

She needs a drink.

 

A drink, as it turns out, is entirely the right call. Eygon sits at a stool, his maul occupying another, making somewhat disgruntled small talk with the barkeep.

He grunts as she sits. _Fool enough to play the champion. Gods, what a circus._

_Couldn’t agree more, sirrah._

_Thou’rt practically ringleader of the shitshow, madam pot. Don’t preach it to me._

_Hey, she kept thy girl safe, at least._

_Pfft. She fits in perfectly here as well. Heretics, the lot of them. And they can coo over their tomes together. Maybe she’ll finally make some friends._

_Perhaps she and the Firekeeper can-_

_-nah. I mean, I spent very little time around that big shrine of thine, but anyone looking at that poor girl can tell she’d gone through the wringer._

_Bad blood, there._

_That’s not insurmountable._

_Irina’s a good kid, and she’s finally hit her stride, but she was spared the whole hazing ritual. I don’t begrudge thy Firekeeper a little resentment._

_Touche._ She takes a swig.

_So, what brings thee to this pisshole? Here to celebrate alone with strangers too, are thee?_

_City’s overwhelming. Church is creepy. Tavern’s a bit better._

_Londor’s busy fawning over thy pup, are they?_

_That they are, it seems._

They drink in peaceful relative silence, though the tavern’s other patrons are anything but.

 

_Eygon, where do you think you'll go from here?_

_I was trying to figure that out, frankly. I mean, I’m not even undead like you lot-_

Anri snorts into her ale. _Technically speaking, this body’s never died._

_That’s right fucked._

_It’s all a bit fucked._

_I could go back to Carim. Be done with it all. See if they’ll let me see my sister again, maybe, now that there’s no real use for Firekeepers._

_You say that like thy mind is fixed otherwise._

_She likes your damn bleeding heart of a knight, and like I said, this clusterfuck of misfits is practically made for her. Can’t very well pry her away to the evil we know, now, can I? ‘Specially now that she’s gone and relieved me of my duty._

_She did that?_

_‘s no point, now. Bodyguard was only half the pay. Other half was to –_ he makes a sharp motion, drawing a rough finger quickly across his throat – _if she kept down the road she was on in Carim._

_And you want to talk about “right fucked.”_

_I think the world was just right fucked, to be honest._

She thinks of Gundyr, red-eyed and desperate. Of the Dancer, limbs contorting beyond the range of human flexion, spinning and thrashing, like a dying, mindless beast.

 

She thinks of Sirris, sobbing into her headscarf over the body of her grandfather, who had fought her till his dying breath – a burden she did not ask to bear, that she would have died to bear alone but for a discerning eye and the blessing of the Darkmoon.

 

_You have a point._

_***_

_My soul, can thou hear me?_

_Holy shit. Yes. Where are-_

_-the Sable Church, still. Art thou not?_

_No. Within the city._

_Oh! I was curious if I could speak with thee across more substantial differences thus. I suspect, much to my pleasure, I am near free of whatever politicking I have been forced into. Where in the city?_

_Currently drinking myself into a stupor with Eygon, actually._

_That sounds promising. Save me a seat?_

_I’ll do thee one better, and get thee a bottle. There was a spot near the walls that overlooked the cliffs. If thou’rt up for a spot of climbing, we could escape to the waterfront for a bit._

_Perfect._

_***_

 

She barely makes it out of the church by the time the sky’s subtle shift to dusk has taken root, and a strong sea breeze has begun to blow through the upper city streets.

 

It doesn’t take her long at all to spot what she’s looking for.

 

A familiar figure sits atop one of the walls dressed in a white cotton tunic and breeches, golden hair braided and backlit by what little sunlight still lingers on the horizon. A familiar straight sword is sheathed at her side, and she clutches a dark glass bottle to her knee as she grins at the sky.

 

_Ser knight. Fancy meeting thee here._

 

Anri smiles knowingly. _My lord and fellow knight. Consider me just as surprised as you._

She hauls herself up onto the stone, taking Anri’s arm for leverage.

_How’s Eygon?_

_Surprisingly sentimental. He kept calling thee “pup.”_

_Speaking of canines, did’st thou know Yuria took note of my appreciation of Artorias?_

_Well, it’d be difficult not to, given the frequency with which thou wield his blade._

_I mean, in the manner that I take note of Siegward’s alcohol preferences or listen to Cornyx explain theory of pyromancy despite understanding none of it, but because it simply makes him happy to speak of. In a manner people do when attempting solicitations of friendship._

_Gross. This’ll wash the taste of whatever she sought out of thy mouth._ Anri passes the bottle over, which sloshes with a surprising density once its balance betrays that it is merely three quarters full. _The liquor is… pretty disgusting, actually, I’m not going to lie. I should have checked the label before I nicked it._

_Is it terrible that I’m hoping it’s an attempt to work through the bad blood?_

She takes a swig. _Gods above, that’s foul._

Anri stares out into the ocean, mulling the idea over. She can just see the last traces of sunlight reflected in her irises, dancing across the sparking of tiny flames. Her mind is as far away as her stare is, and she does not need to read the other knight’s soul to know what has her so caught.

 

_There was an awful lot of bad blood._

The sunset catches her scar at this angle too, highlighting the bridge of her nose in a deep orange.

 

But the sight is not white silks, not a rapidly spreading crimson stain.

_Civility is one thing, but asking me to consider the possibility of friendship is another thing entirely. Not without an awful lot of work, on her part._

_Liliane seemed a bit-_

_-unhinged? Granted, have we met a cleric who wasn’t?_

_Sirris. Yorshka._

_A cleric who wasn’t a Darkmoon Blade. And I was going to say I liked her, though I suspect her brashness is as much a mask as Yuria’s unforthcoming nature and reliance on literal ones._

_Yoel._

_Yoel sold thee sorceries! That’s no cleric!_

_Shut it, you! He was a pilgrim of Londor – that has to count!_

_Does that make every crawling fellow within the walls of that building a cleric, then, if they’re all pilgrims?_

_Stop laughing at me!_

_No, I simply can’t help but think-_

-of how _lucky_ she is.

 

_Anri, shall we walk along the water?_

They spend several hours, barefoot on the beach instead of the bier, walking along the waterfront to gaze out at the endless depths and to take some solace in the other’s company.

 

Perhaps it’s the proximity – to each other, to the sea, to Londor – or perhaps it’s the nerves, perhaps they’ve both pushed themselves far too hard for far too long, but the strength of flame burning its way through their bloodstream resonates, as if calling out to something beyond themselves, and they both feel it _,_ a strange fever thrumming its way through their veins. The stars flicker in their puzzling orbits, slowly spinning in grand, sweeping arcs across the vast firmament of the sky with a cold, distant indifference that leaves the both of them unsettled and – consequentially –  intrigued.

 

The faint, ethereal lights are nothing like the warm radiance of the sun or the gentle reflection of the moon. It is sublime.

_What do you think they are?_

_Does the flame feel like this inside thee too?_

It is intoxicating.

 

Or, well, that could be the alcohol Anri found.

 

_My dear ash, we should make our way abed._

 

_We ought to sleep this off._

_Responsibly, yes, we really ought to. And I need to describe for you, in vivid detail, this armor._

_I’m going to see it on the morrow!_

_Yes, but I want to tell you about it again! Vividly. Because it’s incredibly sexy. I don’t think I’ve seen a sexier set of armor in my life. Except thine, but that’s thee, not thy armor – the armor is really, not what suits thee in this, it’s frankly lucky to have thee,_

_Anri, wait, is it not weird, that you met Yuria’s sister wearing the armor made for the man that murdered her?_

_It’s not that strange, thou met Horace and he wore armor belonging to a man who tried to kill me-_

_-wait, seriously?_

_And anyway, thou’ve interrupted my fantasy, and I was going to tell thee, I wanted to describe it to thee while getting thee off-_

_-hang on, go back-_

_-I told thee, it’s his armor, it’s fine, anyway, if we must speak of such matters instead of better things,_ _I’ve been thinking about the Cathedral of the Deep. Aldrich’s faithful gather there still, do they not?_

_They do. They must. I doubt they’d stop their worship even for the end of an age. If anything, they’d just take it as-_

_-validation, I know. It unnerves me. Deeply. Would it not be better to see it…._ She gestures outward with her right hand, vague and confused, difficult expressing what’s on her mind.

 

_See it what? Exorcised?_

_Burnt, rather. Some of the walls are woodwork, even amongst the stone. We could return and set it alight._

…

_They eat people. You claimed yourself that there was a new archdeacon. The notion of them setting out to repeat their cycle again haunts me. At the very least, it would assuage my fears if we could return and get a grip on the state of things._

 

_Oh no, you mistake my shock for not having thought of the idea myself. I’m all for a spot of arson._

_Excellent. We’ve a lovely date, planned, in any event, then._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, so, the Sword of Avowal thing isn’t all headcanon. Check out the description for the weapon art for the Onyx Blade. 
> 
> Also, shoutout to tumblr user moonlitinsight's original Midnight Set design, which uhhh may have highkey inspired the armor design for Anri here. Go check it out. It's gorgeous.


	12. Chapter 12

There is a chill in the air the following evening, a bated breath amidst the pilgrims gathering at the base of the stone-hewn steps of the Sable Church, murmuring amongst themselves beneath the soft glow of the lanterns hung by priestesses from the street posts.

 

Londor has but seen a few glimpses of their new Lord in the few days since she has usurp’d the Flame. They are beyond eager to see her in the flesh - does she live up to Liliane's stories, the rumors, is it true she fought Gwyn's  _firstborn_ , what must such a creature  _look_ like?

 

An eerie waltz echoes from the church itself, the remnant of an old melody, and the crowd murmurs appreciatively at the spectacle. So rarely do they have the occasion to pride themselves on the artistic applications of sorceries. 

 

Her dress is white lace, embroidered with countless tiny glittering stones like the first frost - twinkling titanite creeping slowly across her skirt in patterns that mimic the delicate filigree of the Wolf Knight’s breastplate. Above it, a veil, enchanted with tiny flickering points of light, atop a crown of stars.

 

She wears a single white blossom behind her right ear. The crowd does not notice.

 

It's not for them, though.

 

Anri’s armor is not lost on her, and it is indeed as splendid as described, but the look on her face when she removes her helmet – eyes wide, _starstruck_ – will be forever burnt into the forefront of her memory of this moment.

 

The ceremony, at their insistence, is kept as simple as possible. An oath to each other, over clasped forearms, the fire pounding its way through their veins.

 

_I to you avow myself, Ser Anri of Astora, as your faithful knight and spouse._

_I to you avow myself, fellow Ash, to whom my soul is joined, as your faithful knight and spouse._

(She thinks of poor Sirris, their loyal knight, body rotting beneath the dirt of the Untended Graves.)

 

(They will tend to the Graves.) 

_Wherever, whenever I am needed, and even if all should turn against you, my loyalty shall never waver._

 

And Anri kneels before her, and unsheathes her blade, and it is not the Sword of Avowal, but her straight sword. She holds it out, arm trembling, eyes alight with-

 

Trust.

 

For they’re on the steps of the church, surrounded by the faithful, and she’s holding out her weapon to the woman who slew her in a profaned chapel, who got her killed in another.

 

_Who redeemed me in a third. Who right now weds me in a fourth._

She takes the blade, performs the accolade, and as Anri waits for her to call out, to lift her from the church steps, she kneels, meets her eyes-

 

-and stabs the blade into the cracked mortar of the stone steps between them.

 

_Let it not be said that the Lord of Londor refuses to acknowledge that she could not stand here today without the strength you lent her. Rise._

And all of Londor kneels with their Lord, to Anri of Astora.

 

***

 

The streets of Londor ring with revelry that night. Music echoes through the crowds as dancing spills out into the thoroughfares. The Firekeeper joins them, spinning from partner to partner until she’s dizzy and light-headed and punch-drunk, though she's also pleasantly buzzed. She has never seen so many people before, and she has never seen so many smiles. She has never felt the corners of her mouth ache, so, either.

 

From the shadows, a dark-haired apostate watches. Amidst Londor’s celebrations of its new Lords, of their marriage, of the new age, she smiles as the Firekeeper celebrates something of her own. She’d been a prisoner once too, no slave to fate like the Firekeeper, but well enough to recognize the telltale signs of a woman rejoicing in her newfound freedom.

 

There’s a spark in the woman’s eye.

 

Karla has never been a fan of institutions. She’d come to the shrine when the Ashen One offered succor, especially after Irithyll, but Londor was something else entirely.

 

It’s another church, right? Slave to Fire, subservient to Velka, it was all the same to her. Where there's religion, there's heretics, and her existence is a sin in and of itself. She can't imagine Velka looks fondly on her, and that's assuming her _priestesses_  could be assuaged.

 

So why was she here?

 

She’d seen Yuria from her little nook below the stairs, watched her writing her letters. Last time there was an upheaval this large, those who followed the Old Witch payed dearly for crimes not their own. The Age of Fire was now firmly ended, but who’s to say what would become of its vestiges?

 

She’d had to know. And if she’d come to find her locked deep beneath the earth, well, not that the Ashen One would allow it, she was far too soft-hearted for that, but still, she’d needed to be certain.

 

And if there’s a place for the Firekeeper in a world without fire, then, well…

 

…maybe there’s a place for a wretched child of the Abyss, too.

 

The Firekeeper’s eyes light up as Karla emerges from the shadows, and despite the brisk night breeze, Karla has never felt so warm.

 

***

 

Eygon and Irina listen from the walls of the courtyard, Carim forgotten for but a moment. Irina breathes deeply, listening to the sound of cacophony, of thousands of chittering voices singing dissonant, clashing melodies, and it brings a soft smile to her face. Eygon watches them sway in the streets below, watches the knights and priests alike dance in the courtyard of the Sable Church, watches Irina sigh contentedly, presses the rough edge of his bare hand against the soft skin of her own, watches her smile, watches her lace her gentle fingers with his own.

 

They dance, later, atop the walls. A Knight of Carim is always true to his word.

 

***

 

Liliane of Londor retires to the small chapel that evening, as the celebrations wind down and her responsibilities to her people abate long enough for her to slip away. She lights three candles atop a small stone altar before a faceless statue of her goddess that she cannot see, and she _burns._ They have done it, she and Yuria and this Champion of Ash, have jolted the world past its painful period of stagnation, but-

 

-she _screams_ , and the candles tumble and fall and sputter out as a wave of force bursts from the center of her core to the edges of the grotto. The effigy before her fractures further, another sharp crack, another splinter, loud enough that it cannot be ignored.

 

Faithful service is not fair. The leaden silence of Londor never agreed with Liliane either.

 

She looks up, red-eyed. The crack in the idol forms the barest hint of an expression on its face, an unsteady curve, a trace of a smile. 

 

But of course, she cannot see.

 

(She will find it in time, when she comes to mend it, and will wonder if her goddess is capable of sympathy, or this is just satisfaction, a meted punishment for her own sins.)

 

***

 

Deep within the halls of the Sable Church, a black-robed scholar wanders, the taste of liquor heavy on his tongue. He marvels at the architecture, the garlands, the repositories, the _stars._

  
This is a debt he will surely never be able to repay.

 

There is the soft scuffing of boots across stone, so quiet that perhaps another less trained for the sound would miss it, and Orbeck turns to see the graceful form of Londor’s eldest sister approach.

 

Yuria of Londor, unhelmed, leans across the windowsill without giving him so much as a cursory glance.

 

_Enjoying thyself, assassin?_

_Thou’rt more assassin than I. But I am enjoying mineself. Thou’ve done commendable work._

Yuria disregards the complement, instead continuing to watch the few figures moving through the rear courtyard of the Sable Church, observe the lights in the city beyond, turn her eyes towards the stars.

 

Orbeck continues.  _Surely_ , _one as reputable as thee, and as convinced of mine ill intent must have done thy research. I mean that in the most complimentary fashion – thou’rt by far the most intelligent of all those gathered in the shrine, mineself included._

_Enough to be reasonably wary of thy intent towards the Ashen One and mineself._

_Then thou knew, certainly, that once I became Undead I was exiled from the school._

_That was little comfort to me. There’s plenty of work for an Undead assassin. The Mother of Rebirth and her Fingers, the Mound-Makers, the faithful of the Saint of the Deep…_

_Yes, but unlike Leonard, I did not refer to mineself as Middlefinger Orbeck._

_You had her ferrying about seeking ancient spell scrolls. Forgive me for suspicious of thy intent._

_Let’s not pretend I didn’t consider killing thee as well._

_Indeed._

There’s a moment of silence, only interrupted by a shout of delight from a laysister in the courtyard who should undoubtedly be abed at this hour. 

 

_Yuria. I’ve long given up killing, but I certainly envy thy approach to it._

_Is that so?_

_Every killing has a consequence. No matter the victim’s stature. Even as I bloodied my hands, I never realized that simple truth. It is folly to claim lives recklessly, and that is exactly what I did. I was the very definition of a fool._

 

_Thy assassination, brutal as it was to our mutual friend, was weighted, was it not?_

Yuria gives him a calculated look, eyes narrow and uneasy, and he feels like she's seeing right through him. He tries not to give away how much he's drunk. He doesn't want to seem like a complete idiot, even though the cat's out of the metaphorical bag with regards to his scholarship.

 

_It was. Since I first picked up the blade, so too have I borne the consequences of wielding it. Perhaps I give thee too little credit._

_A tentative cooperation, then, for the sake of our mutual friend?_

_Only if thou permit me to glean some knowledge from the scrolls she gifted thee. I overheard talk of Oolacile. I must know what was written upon those, since the gods know the both of you haven't the training to fully appreciate what she's likely dredged up._

 

***

 

It is the first time since they crawled their way out of broken, untended graves, the first time either can remember in memories fragmented and sharp and murky that they have the luxury of time.

 

They stand, softened by each other’s presence, in the inherited chambers of a long-lost woman and linger in a long-delayed moment of respite that they’ve longed for since Irithyll. Promises of time spent at Firelink linger on their tongues, stamped into their joined soul, as Anri’s helm falls to the floor from loose fingers, clattering against the stone. She winds her hands into the crimson sash around Anri's neck and pulls what she can of the heavy silk away, burying her nose, her lips, in the crook of Anri’s neck, behind her ear, between thick fabric and skin, the warm metal of her wife’s gorget.

 

Anri’s hands tangle in her hair, one thumb rubbing gently against the back of her neck, and she moans appreciatively into the skin beneath her mouth.

 

Her fingers slowly trace the seams of Anri’s pauldrons, lingering on each clasp as she unhooks the smooth metal from the breastplate, hooking her fingers beneath them to reveal sweat-damp cotton, to run her palms along broad shoulders moving just beneath it.

 

They take the time they’ve long coveted, wrapped in each other’s arms, to linger a while as they are. Anri’s skin tastes of salt, and Anri’s own lips move softly against her neck, puffs of hot breath and the gentle press of teeth to an old scar spurring her on, leaving her pleasantly warm.

 

Anri pulls back to catch her breath, and her eyes are far away, hazy with delight, lust, and something else entirely.

 

_Thy hair’s askew._

She smiles.

 

_So is thine. And so’s thy armor._

She kneels, delicate fabric of the dress padding the stonework against her knees, and stares up at the woman before her, armor half-doffed, enshrouded in candlelight. Anri was right, gods. She can’t imagine having faced half of Lothric without her by her side.

 

_May I doff it for thee?_

_What am I to do while thou’rt down there?_

_Have patience. Or, if thou wish, fix my hair, I suppose, since it’ll be within thy reach._

She extends a hand to Anri’s leg, to the dark titanite greave encasing her calf, and runs her fingers along the gold filigree, up the clasps along the back, feeling the seams of the slim leather boot beneath – not for battle, but for show. Anri inhales deeply, her calf flexing beneath the Ashen One’s touch. She continues tracing the filigree, extending her reach to the cuisses, running her fingers along the warm metal encasing Anri’s thigh before bringing her other hand around the back to pop the clasps on the greave below.

 

Anri, who’s been gathering stray strands of her hair, tucking them behind her ears, running her fingers through loose curls, gasps, and tightens her grip.

 

The Ashen One's lips join her hands, pressing kisses to heated metal, a faint taste of iron, and she’s rewarded with a low moan. Slowly moving along the gold dust, taking her time, she teases towards the inner thigh, to the seam between leather trousers and metal armor, and inhales deeply. Metal, leather, a faint trace of sweat accumulated from wearing plate all day. No blood.

 

She can smell Anri, too, from here, wanting above her – a faint trace of sex.

 

Fingers wind around her hair, and she moves onwards, gently ducking beneath the edge of a tabard to press her lips to the inside of Anri’s clothed thigh, near the top of her greave, as she moves to undo the final clasp.

 

It comes off and she moans into the fabric, the greave still hanging from her belt, unbalanced in the air, but neither of them care.

 

Anri’s trousers are damp already, and will be damper still, because there are too many _belts_ and doing this properly feels like conceding to the act of nobility that they’re playing at. Anri, to her credit, catches on quickly, bracing herself with one arm against the nearby bedpost.

 

She loves her. She loves the muffled groan Anri makes when she mouths at the seam of her trousers, loves how she can feel the muscle of her thigh twitch beneath her hand with the exertion of maintaining balance, tremble with every movement of her tongue, application of pressure.

 

She loves her face. Her warmth. Her company.

 

She has managed to find a scrap of happiness in this miserable, godforsaken land, and she would not surrender what she has with Anri for anything, and-

 

-It is overwhelming, to feel as one soul, conjoined thus.

 

They stand there, a moment, catching their breath.

 

She is overwhelmingly happy, so why does her soul ache thus?

 

The guilt, perhaps, and its inescapable scar, carved across Anri’s face. The lingering pain of the past, the ghosts of friends and horrors alike, still dogging their footsteps. The fear of it falling out from beneath her feet again.

 

Stability has never come easily to her, for she’s never had the practice. Anri’s much akin to her in that.

 

They shall learn together, then.

 

Anri’s face is pleasantly flushed, stray pieces of hair sticking to her forehead, as she slowly moves to unbuckle her remaining pauldron. _Help me remove this properly, and I will repay thee the favor._

 

Her armor is doffed with a slow reverence, the occasional press of lips to fabric, a pleasant lull for conversation. They linger in each other’s presence, the closeness of skin, the freedom of time. It’s a team effort to figure out how to remove the lacings on her gown, to undo her undergarments, but they eventually manage, crawling onto the bed together.

 

Anri bites at the dip of her collarbone, tracing old scars with her mouth as she’s been wont to do. Yet, and she shudders at the sensation of hot breath, slick tongue, against sensitive skin, she’s following the pinpricks of arrows again, so perhaps she just takes pleasure in marking over the scars Aldrich left on her body. Either way, it’s lovely, she’s warm, and a free hand joins her mouth to follow the trail of bruises down her collarbone, over her breast, before settling there.

 

Anri’s other hand rubs gentle circles over her hip, dipping lower, and she reaches for it, sliding it between her parted legs. Anri takes the hint and quickens their pace, smiling against her chest.

 

It takes little time for her to come apart, but Anri doesn’t stop, continuing to rub lazy circles with her thumb, kissing along her ribs, and she groans. Anri continues at their former, slow rhythm, eventually propping herself up on her free arm to watch, or perhaps to take the time to truly appreciate the body before her for the first time.

 

Eventually she lingers on an old bite wound spanning most of her torso – one of the Pontiff’s hounds, from the Irithyll bridge.

 

_These scars were fresh the day we first slept together, were they not?_

_Several hours prior._

_They’ve faded well._

They have. It was a quick death, at least, and her body’s been through a lot since then.

_And what of this one?_ Anri runs her thumb across the thick scar of a deep puncture that curves across her upper abdomen, carving through the skin above her ribs, still working her other hand in deft circles.

 

 _That one-_ she grips Anri’s forearm hard enough to bruise, grinding down against her wrist, and panics. _Anri, please, it was not a pleasant-_

Anri slows her pace, and she _groans,_ because she was _close_ again, and she doesn’t want to think of this, but now she’s breathing harder and all too quickly and Anri’s eyes are suddenly soft with concern and hers are burning-

 

-and Anri rests her scarred nose against her own, touching foreheads, and it’s too much.

 

_Should we stop?_

It’s too much. Her voice cracks on the name.

 

_Horace._

_Are you–_ Anri cuts off mid-sentence, and the hand between her legs stops entirely. _I don’t-_

She moves her hand from Anri’s back to cover the hand on her stomach, directing it along the line of her scar, where his halberd tore through her skin, pierced her lung, left her drowning in the murky water. _Horace. That one was-_

_-Horace._ Anri’s voice is strangled. _Oh._

She traces the scar again, paying attention to its curvature. She knows his halberd. She knows how much force he wielded it with, and she can see Anri bite back a small wince at the imagined blow.

_He killed thee?_

_I killed both of you. Why are you in bed with me?_

_A good fuck._ Her voice is sarcastic, but she can tell Anri’s on the verge of tears herself. _No, because I love thee, idiot. Thou went to the ends of the world to make amends, intended not to kill me, avenged my family when I could not, and ate me out in a church when I was going hollow because my best friend had gone and done the same thing._

_I ate thee out in a church because I wanted to._

_Technically thou just did it again, but my point still stands._

_You know, I thought for a brief moment there thou were thinking of him. I mean, he was very handsome beneath the helm, if burly men appeal to thee._

_Being killed is more haunting than sexy._

_Fortunately, I was not awake to see thee cut me down. It’d have ruined thy image. Though there’s something appealing about the notion of thy blade to my throat-_

_-I was terrified, when I saw thee not at Firelink, I’d find thee in Anor Londo hollow. After Horace - I was terrified._

_If not for Yuria, perhaps thou would’ve._

I _cannot see a world in which thou hollowed before Aldrich lay slain. Give thyself credit. It was irrational of me._

_I worried for thee too. Thou had’st nothing – not even a name – to attach thyself to. If it was that easy for myself to slip, losing a little hope, even with connections who cared for me and a purpose still out there, what of thee, with only vague orders and no real tie to them?_

She shakes her head. _Let’s go back to the good fuck. That was much more fun._

Anri lays down beside her, pulling her into a hug, inhaling deeply.

 

_At least we don’t have to worry about that any more. The luxuries of a new age._

_It’s beyond strange, to say the least._

_Weirdly liberating, though._

They lie there a while, curled together, taking comfort in each other’s presence. Anri presses kisses to the top of her head, she traces idle circles across Anri’s back. When they do resume their pursuit, it’s tinged with urgency, with melancholy, a sense of seriousness in what they’re doing.

 

They’ve realized now, the reality of their situation. They not only have time to call their own, no longer to be threatened by duty to flames and lords, but the collective sigh of relief at their victory over impossible odds has only just drawn attention to how long they’ve both been holding their breath. To how vicious the consequences of failure could have been.

 

Anri groans softly into her mouth as the Ashen One works her own hand between them, trying to keep pace with Anri’s between her legs. Their other hands lie to the side, fingers interlaced atop the sheets, clutching tightly to each other.

 

Overhead, a small window illuminates the room, and the lonely stars stand vigil – waiting, watching.

 

_Fear not the dark, my friend. It’s all sunlight and starlight from here on out._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi y'all, wow, sorry, I fell down the Sekiro rabbit hole and have just been super sick since. On the plus side, the chapter after this is already half done.
> 
> This is technically where our story ends - there's an epilogue, though. However, there are two bonus chapters first, if you crave a little bit more H/C and whumph and want some sweet Ariandel and Ringed City content. Stay tuned.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been 84 years.... lmao i'm sorry I have been sick as fuck
> 
> Also for people binge-reading the fic for the first time, this is the first of (soon to be) 3 epilogue chapters, and is *much* longer than the chapters thus far. If it's 3 am, please go to sleep and read the rest in the morning. 
> 
> All of the spoilers for Ashes of Ariandel, though you probably already knew that was coming. See endnotes if you're like, oh no, why is there a Seath reference here. The answer is: I have my reasons, but also, it's my fanfiction, and *I* get to choose the parents for the godbabies of unspecified vaguely draconic heritage.
> 
> (Also Seath is the only dragon that we know Fucks who isn't Oceiros, and like absolute HELL was I going to let Oceiros Continue to Fuck in this house.)
> 
> (This is not actually that relevant to the fic it's just late and I have so many feelings about the godchildren in this series)

She had never seen the Cathedral of the Deep with a capable figurehead at the helm. She shudders to even imagine it.

 

The church is almost a self-sustaining organism at this point, the corruption seeping beyond the dirt and into the restless bones that drag themselves, festering, through the maggot-encrusted ruins of the encircling graveyard. What little flesh remains hangs on the sallow faces of bloated, hollow priests that still wander the halls until she and Anri cut them down. The disparity never fails to catch her attention.

 

They move towards the small chapel on the outskirts. They can do a bit of reconnaissance on the roof from there, see what the bulk of Aldrich’s faithful have decided to make of the new age, set fire to the thatches, catch their breath. 

 

It’s nice to be out of Londor, though.

 

Liliane and Yuria readily gave their blessing to the idea – Yuria, in an effort to make amends, but also due to her acknowledgement that updated intelligence on Aldrich’s followers would be useful.  

 

Liliane, on the other hand, was a fan for two reasons. The Cathedral of the Deep was built atop an old site of Velka’s, which would be well received by her followers within Londor. Politically, removing the faction from play altogether would likely improve Londor’s diplomatic power within the world at large, as Aldrich left plenty of bad blood in his wake. She also agreed with Yuria, noting that it’d be worthwhile to see what the priests are up to, given that the Saint of the Deep was the only other to proclaim an age beyond Fire and Dark.

 

It turns out what they’re up to is continuing to eat people, same shit as always, only with a bloated sense of vindication in their martyr’s prophetic ramblings.

 

The Cleansing Chapel is its old dusty self, pews askew, bonfire warm. A bygone statue stands guardian over the flame – a woman, wings spread, head broken off. Defiled. The Saint of the Deep does not favor old gods in his house of worship.

 

She’s never paid it much mind in the past, but it does bear quite a few similarities to the statues she’s seen in Londor – Velka perhaps, if Liliane is correct.

 

Her boots are wet with mud and filth, and she’s halfway to the flame, still holding her torch to Anri’s pauldrons and the stubborn remnants of grave maggots crawling thereon, when she stops in her tracks.

 

A thin, cracked prayer echoes faintly across the stonework from behind the altar.

 

_Merciful goddess… mother of the Forlorn, who have no place to call their own…_

An old man. Not a skeletal carcass, nor a priest. Nor, seemingly, a mindless hollow. Uneaten, mercifully, so with some strength to him.

 

Anri cocks her head curiously. A friend of the goddess of sin is no friend of Aldrich. That’s good enough for the both of them.

 

_…Please bear witness to our resolve… Fire for Ariandel…_

_…Fire for Ariandel…. And the Ash to kindle flame…_

The man kneels fully prostrated before the statue, a knight of some kind, garbed in a strange crimson hood, only slightly lifting his head at the sound of approaching bootsteps.

 

The Ashen One clears her throat, Anri at her side, as soon as he trails off in his prayer. _What is it you seek from Velka, in a desolate place such as this one?_

_Wait, you’ve… the same scent as that woman… then you must be an Ashen One. You must be!_

Anri nods. _Indeed. The both of us are Ash._

_You don’t know how long I’ve searched. I have a kindness to ask of you. My lady lives in the cold land of Ariandel. I need you to show her flame. A proper flame, that will burn the rot away. If you truly are Ash, then it must be fire that you seek?_

_I suppose you have found the sensible people for the job, if flame is what you seek. We-_

_-we are, indeed, in a unique position to be of service when it comes to flame. Where is your lady, and who is she? Why does she need to see flame? What rot do you speak of?_

_The painting of Ariandel. Well, rotted scrap of it, that is._

_Your lady dwells within a painting?_

_Trapped within ‘t, but denied her rightful role in repainting it. It’s naught but rot and filth. Ariandel clings to his darkness, and I know not what became of the Ashen woman I found._

She can feel Anri’s soul bubble up within her own with a question she’s mulled over herself, even as no sound escapes her helmet. _Is this truly reasonable?_

She answers back wordlessly in kind. _Think of ‘t as a brief respite from Londor. Besides, art thou not intrigued by the prospect? The woman could have been someone from countless cycles past, and at the very least, someone’s ward is being trapped by a man who sounds like many men we’ve fought thus far._

_Touche. But if we can’t escape from the painting, I will have thy head for’t._

_We’ve got the first flame coursing through our bloodstream. I’m pretty sure we could figure out some way to escape from the painting, even if it took us a year or so._

Anri breaks the momentary silence. _Very well. What’s thy name, serrah?_

_Gael, Ser Ash. Slave Knight to the Lady of the Painting._

_Slave Knight Gael, then. I’m Ser Anri. We’ll do it, then._

_Excellent! Go on, here, I’ve a scrap of the painting with me –_ and the man pulls out a decaying piece of cloth, covered in rotted varnish, and cradles it tenderly within his shaking hands, holding them outstretched to the pair.

 

_Very well._

Two gauntleted fingertips, a flash of bright light, and a deep tugging sensation–

_-and then, the Ashes were three._

 

***

 

The snow falls in Ariandel in thick clumps, unlike the gentle icy pinpricks of Irithyll. It blankets the sky as well as the ground, clouding the landscape from curious eyes eager to peel back the layers of crumbling paint. In the distance, she can barely make out the crest of a spire through the thick layer of sleet. The storm roars in her ears, blocking all sound but for the howling of a wolf.

 

Wolves.

 

They should have been paying more attention, but the pair of them are exhausted at this point. The painting’s inhabitants are well-camouflaged and vicious – and all of them hollow, eye sockets empty – and even the trees ensnare them when they make the mistake of wandering too close, grasping with tangled branches so bitterly they burn away flesh as they pierce skin. They run, making a mad dash for cover without minding the stability of their footing, the terrain partially obscured beneath the heavy snowfall.

 

The ice cracks much like a bone does – a harsh, resounding fracture – and the ground gives way beneath their feet.

 

Which, of course, alerts the pack to their location. Before they can even find their footing, there’s at least five wolves upon them and even more howls drawing closer, furry maws snapping at their throats, claws tearing at the joints of their armor.

 

Five wolves become ten, become even more. She loses track when one digs into her shoulder so hard her vision turns white while she’s still trying to bash one off her side, and she opens her mouth to call out for Anri, but she can’t hear anything above the cacophony of the blizzard, the howling, her own keening. She can taste blood in the back of her throat, and she almost wishes it was the creepy trees, because they’d have the good sense to be faster about it.

 

She can’t see anything beyond white – white snow, white fur, fogged helm, tunnel vision.

 

The beast at her side _blessedly goes limp,_ and that’s the last thought she can muster before her knees buckle, torn still between thoughts of prying its fangs from her torso with trembling hands and halfheartedly slashing at the wolf still doing its best to maul her from behind as she falls face-first into the snowbank.

 

There’s a grunt, a yelp, and finally silence. Her helm is pulled from her face, and she coughs, drooling crimson into the wet snow beneath her. Anri kneels, helm also removed, and uncorks her flask.

 

She’s keeping weight off her right leg, and sure enough, there’s a trail of red in the snow, flickering in and out of the foggy white that threatens to overtake her altogether.

 

The snow burns the wound on her side. She’s going to get frostbite.

 

Anri takes a swig of Estus, looking bruised, tired, and very, very fed up with their current situation before shoving the vial forward.

 

Snowflakes are sticking in Anri's hair. It’s nice to travel with a friend instead of bleeding out here, in the snowpack, all alone. It would have been nice to have someone to hold her hair out of her own vomit in Farron Swamp.

 

_Come on, drink, so we can get out of here before more of them smell all the blood and come running. I will not have thee bleed out on me._

She opens her mouth to reply, to insist Anri take what’s left of the Estus, so at least one of them is in fighting state, but the words come out garbled, bloody saliva foaming on her lips. Fucking wolf must have sunk really deep.

_Listen, if I’m going to drag thy mangled ass to a fire, I need thee to not die on me._

She’s got a point there.

 

They split the flask between the two of them – she takes enough to patch the worst of the internal damage and maintain some semblance of consciousness, and Anri enough to keep her leg steady.

 

Anri doesn’t so much drag her to cover as alternate between supporting her as she stumbles through the heavy snowbanks and carrying her mauled form entirely, occasionally leaving her in cover a moment to scout ahead.

 

Every step jars her shoulder. It’s excruciating. Anri can’t be much better off. It’s only once they make it to the top of the hill, a better vantage point, before the tension of the situation begins to crack around the edges.

 

Mostly because Anri, who stops for a moment to readjust her arm around her, is struck by the irony of the circumstances.

 

_Oh, Knight Artorias, thy way with wolves, I was simply awestruck-_

She coughs. Shut _up, or I’ll stab thee in the face again._

_My apologies. I couldn’t resist._

_If it hadn’t been for the damned trees, and then the ice collapse, and **then** the-_

_-thy wolves, yes-_

_-yes, then the bloody wolves, fine. Fine. I killed the Lords of Cinder but got mauled by a pack of bloody fucking wolves like a child wandering in a forest._

_That’s enough, there were several dozen of them, it’s understandable – don’t shout, or we’ll soon find more before we find flame to heal the both of us._

They find shelter at the base of the hill, the remnants of a bonfire tucked into a small cave insulated from the growing storm.

 

It is bitterly cold here. They huddle together before the small fire, shivering as the estus knits exposed muscle and torn skin back together, repairs the damage done. Anri has to remove her greave to gently hammer it back into shape - the wolf bent it when it fractured her tibia. Her own chestplate is rent, and her left pauldron is partially crushed, and it's  _bitterly cold_ without the added layers, even with the shelter from the wind.

 

_Was not the Pontiff from such a place, Anri?_

_They said he crawled his way out of a frigid painting._

_Dost thou think his hounds were truly his, or, perhaps-_

_-owing to the corruption of his homeland? I’m not certain myself._

_Nonetheless, it seems we’ve still found ourselves on task, even as our path diverged from the Cathedral._

_  
An old corruption, a rot with ties to the Pontiff and thus to the Maneater himself? And a painting we get to set aflame after we’re done? It’s a holiday._

_Irithyll had gentler snow._

_This is more akin to sleet. Astoran snow was similar, when it stormed, though given the quantity we’ve trudged through, I suspect the weather here is regularly foul._

_Makes sense, given it birthed the damned Pontiff._

_Oh – but I’ve forgotten one crucial piece of the holiday._

_What, pray tell?_

_Perhaps, if you keep feeding them thy limbs, thou might be able to tame a Sif of thy own, and-_

_-Anri, I swear, I will-_

Anri presses her lips gently to the bloodied mess of her shoulder, healed by the flame but burning with phantom pain nonetheless, and then again, more urgently, to her own lips, lingering there for a moment.

 

She can taste the faint trace of her own blood on her tongue as Anri pulls back.

 

_I’m glad thou’rt all right. Don’t do that again, please._

***

 

The chapel, derelict and old, ought to be the first sign of trouble. They’ve always had mixed luck in chapels, from Yorshka’s to Londor’s, to, gods forgive them, the Darkmoon’s. The paint on the exterior crumbles. The building itself stands impossibly tall at the end of a long rope bridge, off-kilter. The few gravestones by the sides are tended to by shuddering, sickly bird hybrids who linger nearby as if preparing to die in the correct location. 

 

A man in colors unmatched to Ariandel’s muted browns and blues – black and a hint of purple, tabard edged with faded gold embroidery – sits, one knee raised, and stands as the pair approaches. His face is helmed in metal, a longsword sheathed at his side. Not hollow, but not the ash the old man spoke of. He turns his head from Anri’s intricate armor to her own proud figure at Anri’s side.

 

_Well, well. You’re Lady Yuria’s Lord of Hollows._

_News travels fast._

The man doesn’t respond to her affirmation, gives no explanation of how he came to the conclusion, shows none of his cards. His voice betrays a hint of disdain – disgust, disregard? Whoever he is, they will find no welcome here. At the very least, none with him.

 

_No bell tolls, and yet, you’ve slipped into the painting?_

The three of them stand in silence, snow filling in the footsteps behind them, the gap the man left upon the church steps.

 

_Ah, no matter. If you’ve lost your way, the words of Lady Friede will guide you._

_Lady Friede? Or Elfriede?_

_Lady Yuria was surprisingly forthcoming, I see._

Anri nudges her. _Suppose thou she was Gael’s Ash?_

_Your familiarity with our position and Lady Elfriede suggests you’d be Ser Vilhelm._

_Oh, mistake me not, twas merely-_

_-this armor was meant for thee, I take it?_ Anri’s voice is strained. She cannot tell if it is impatience or posturing, but there’s a slight waver to the tone, a hint of something more amidst her informality.

 

Understanding, perhaps, as much as she’s loathe to admit it. They ought to have no quarrel with the man. What little Anri’s spoken of Liliane’s history with him is wretched, but the world’s been thus, and she’s rarely one to strike first.

 

After all, she followed Yuria.

_I served Lady Friede in Londor. Your plate is from Londor. Lady Yuria would not relinquish it without cause._

_In Londor, you served? Do you not serve Lady Friede here in Ariandel?_

_You may be Lord of Londor, my Lady, but I am not beholden to you. Your questions would be best directed elsewhere, and thus I must ask – what’s keeping you? Go inside. Show respect. Let Lady Friede speak to you. Tarry no longer and begone._

_An affirmation would suffice. That keeps me._

_To sate your idle curiosity, I’ll offer you a piece of advice, for there is one thing you should know, for Lady Yuria and for Londor._

_And what would that be?_

_Inside the cold painting, curiosity could be your cross. Stray from the withering flame, and the snow will swallow you whole._

***

The chapel doors are heavy, wrought iron bars against rotting wood, creaking in the storm. Anri’s voice is soft behind her shoulder as she shoves them open.

 

_I’ll be a moment behind._

_Shout if there’s trouble._

_Same to thee._

Inside, a small fire burns at the center of the chamber, surrounded by dusty marble pillars that stretch to impossible heights. Brass candelabras stand, dripping wax onto the stonework and illuminating the room with a warm glow. Piled around the corners of the room are mountains of paintings – all portraits, mostly women, a few corvian, one she spies looks something akin to Gael.

 

She pauses at the first heaping mound of them, brushing dust from a soft canvas to reveal a gentle face beneath. It is an idealized version of a human being, to be certain. Like the portraits of Princess Gertrude in Lothric Castle, the woman is depicted with an air of nobility in her manner, though her garb is more befitting of a priestess. 

 

But they are all the same woman.

 

The very same woman that sits, tending to the small bonfire, the picture of a firekeeper, staring back at her. The woman’s expression is patient, though her grey eyes are tired in a way that reminds her strangely of Sirris, but not without a hint of curiosity behind her gaze. Her robes match those of the countless paintings – a pale blue fabric, ornate with strange embellishment, rather than Velka’s representative black garb.

 

The woman’s voice, when she speaks, is low and practiced. Welcoming, unlike her fellow, but firm, nonetheless.

 

_I welcome you to the painted world of Ariandel. I am Friede. I have long stood beside our blessed Father and the rest of the Forlorn. But Forlorn thou seemeth not._

_Hollow, I am not, nor abandoned, nor lonely. My thanks, Lady Friede, for thy welcome. I have no name, but am Ash much like thyself._

_Sister Friede, for I am no noble. Then,_ she eyes the Ashen One with a fixed gaze, intent, _thou must have a dear purpose, to have avoided losing thyself with the fading of the flame._

_I certainly do, but hollowing is no concern. Thou’rt undoubtedly familiar with the Sable Church of Londor?_

_They do not advertise their aim widely, and thou’ve not the air of someone born thence._

_No, they do not. Lady Yuria sought me out. Thy youngest sister-_

_I care not for news of that place. Ashen One, please. The affairs of my sisters are not thy own. My purpose drove me hence, and here I shall remain._

_Help me to understand, then. I knew not of thee and thy flight till Yuria had me entrap’d. I would understand if I am doing more harm than I am good._

_I would ask of thee: if thy convictions are this easily swayed, and I mean no disrespect, how canst thou purport to serve thy people?_

_There’s a difference between hesitancy and contemplation. I encountered many who held considerable power in my travels who lacked all manner of internal scrutiny._

_Likewise, I find a similar distinction to be made between and the hubristic certainty of which thou speaks and confidence in the necessity of one’s actions._

There’s the scraping of wood against stone, and she turns her head to see Anri stomp into the chapel, kicking snow off her greaves with barely restrained frustration. Friede – _Elfriede,_ for there can be no doubt as to who the woman in front of her once was – cranes her neck to watch her wife enter, her jaw tightening as her eyes trace the familiar lines of armor.

 

_Meet my purpose, Sister Friede._

_Oh, hello. Sorry. Anri of Astora._

Sister Friede nods once to Anri, and turns her attention back to the Ashen One.

 

_Lord of Hollows, I know not the missteps which led thee to this painted world. But-_

 

And she pauses, giving her a stern look, yet one that only follows from one who sympathizes, who knows all too well the meaning of what she says, or else ardently believes the necessity of their own advice.  _Thy duty is all, and thy duty lieth elsewhere. Return from whence thou camest._

 _I_ _presume it visible to thee? The bonfire here in this room? Tis a meek and faded thing, but ‘twill guide thee nonetheless._

_Who keeps it? Thou’rt a pyromancer, and Ash besides._

_I watch the flame, indeed, so that I might guide errant wanderers like you two home when the need arises._

_We came not to Ariandel for thee,_ Anri interjects, _but on the behalf of a Slave Knight and his Lady, who claims to have brought thee hence._

_Ah, yes. Gael._

_His Lady still wishes to see flame._

_This world is a sanctuary for the Forlorn, eager Ash, those born of the Scholar’s obsession with the First Sin – once bereft of corporeal form and a world of their own, adrift and without home and self. Father Ariandel and I have crafted it to be thus a home and refuge. Should this world wither and rot, even then would Ariandel remain our home._

_Even overtaken as it is with rot?_

_Thou’rt the Lord of Londor, and have thine own subjects to guide. Ah, and speaking thus, before you both depart, there is a thing thou should’st by rights possess. A remembrance of this cold world, for the great Lord of Londor and her spouse. May it help thee bear thy duty._

Friede holds her hand out, cradling a small tungsten ring inset with a pale blue stone. As the cool touch of the metal hits her hands, the lingering chill in the air feels slightly more bearable.

 

The carvings alongside the band remind her of the church walls. _This is of Londor make._

_It was intended for Londor’s Lord. I wore it not, for the painting and its frost became my home. Yet it is precisely for that reason that I never needed such a ring in the end._

 

_Consider it a wedding gift._

 

***

_So, to what do we owe the pleasure of thy ill manner? We gave thee no cause for hostility. This is not thy native land, we trespassed not – we were invited hence, by the same man who professed to invite thy mistress, even, imposed not upon thee, only asking after a woman long missing whose sisters mourn her sudden departure even now._

_I suspect it’s because thou hast something to hide, which is true for all manner of people, and we’re not the kind to judge on first glance. In fact, we have an awful lot in common._

_If thy tongue is of value to thee, which I suspect it is from how thou prattle, I would cease talking._

_If thy distaste for her stems from the sisters’-_

 

Anri corrects herself.

 

 _-From Yuria's contrivance_ , _I just wanted to assure you-_

_-stop it-_

_-she didn’t do it willingly._

_Whatever helps thee sleep at night. Or not. I could care less for the both of thee._

_Fine. How does it feel, then, to wield the sword father to the one supposed to cut through thy skull, siphon out thy soul through its blade? Does it still itch for thy-_

_How does it feel to wear plate designed to mimic the spilling of thy blood?_

_Incredible, actually, once I got over that. Most expensive thing I’ve ever owned. Beautiful workmanship, too. Did Elfriede design it? Did she imagine thy blood across the floor?_

_Don’t speak her name like thou’rt capable of understanding a single thing about her. Not while shackled to a murderer who doesn’t know better than to leave well enough alone._

_Well, I’m imagining it, now. Spilled across the snow._

_I don’t have time to entertain thee-_

_-That’s disgusting-_

_-I’ve work to do. And so have you._

She stomps inside. She will not humor him.

 

She will not bite her tongue, tasting her own blood, trying to get the flavor of his words out of her mouth. Shackled to a murderer.

 

For they’re still shackled. They’re free from the flame, but they’re wrapped up in it as ever, aren’t they?

 

***

 

For all they knock Ariandel, its man-eating wolves, the knee-deep rivers of blood, the crow-men armed with blades, and the vague omnipresent smell of crumbling pigment, there’s a brief moment upon climbing the hill beyond the Corvian village where the both of them feel the touching reality of what they find impact them like a blow to the gut.

 

The Forlorn keep a small graveyard there – in proximity to the village, not isolated in some esoteric dumping grounds or abandoned at the base of a mountain, but close enough to visit regularly. What’s more, despite their world coming apart at the fringes, they regularly maintain it, trimming the foliage, oiling the gates, even leaving flowers at some of the gravestones.

 

It’s enough to make her eyes burn.

 

She reaches for the knight at her side, winding her gauntleted fingers between Anri’s own. Even through the layers of insulation and the chill Ariandel leaves on any and all metal, Anri’s hand is warm as it clutches hers.

 

 _The graves have names_ _here_. Anri's voice is soft, gentle, not to remind her of what she herself has lost, but what she could have had.

_Would we have fought, think'st thou, had the world mourned us? If we had not felt we had-_

_-something yet to prove to them? I would have,_ Anri states, voice low and bitter, _but then again, I fought not for the world, but for myself and friends lost too soon. And friends not yet lost._

There’s a church beyond the graveyard, or the remains of one. Its exterior is well maintained, but the interior, on first glance, though dark, appears to be converted to some sort of repository. Instead of pews or paintings or cold stone floors and sculptures, the split-structure is piled high with books – thick, leather-bound tomes, strewn across tables and shelves alike.

 

The floorboards creak, and a shape shifts in the shadows, moving towards them at a measured pace. The familiar form of Sir Vilhelm scoffs as he lifts his head in her direction, his voice no longer clinging to any semblance of restraint as he addresses her intrusion with resentful satisfaction.

 

_Oh, I’ve seen your kind, time and time again. Every fleeting man must be caught. Every secret must be unearthed. Such is the conceit of the self-proclaimed seeker of truth._

Anri unsheathes her blade the moment he does – she hesitates a moment too long, caught up in his words, the tangled truth of it all, before readying her shield, standing her ground, waiting for the moment to snap.

 

His sword is simple, though beautifully designed – an onyx blade, a greatsword like her own, adorned with the twisted winding pattern she’s so accustomed to seeing amidst Londor’s décor.  

_But in the end you all lack the stomach for the agony you bring upon yourself._

 

And with a flick of his wrist, he cuts through a swathe of air, and the sword _ignites,_ burning with black flames, and he bolts towards them and reaches straight for her throat.

 

***

 

The space is not made for combat, but it is clear that Sir Vilhelm knows it well. He fights with a vigor she has not seen – a mixture of skill and relentless ferocity, constantly pressing onward, the unremitting heat of his blade burning hot enough to scorch skin just from the proximity as she deflects his blows. 

 

It is Anri, later, who realizes he must have sensed her reluctance and acted upon it, for she didn’t have the opportunity. Anri was backed against the splintered remains of a table, and he’d feinted for _her_ and she’d fallen for it.

 

She’d gotten a gloved palm across her face for her trouble, the nauseating sensation of losing the capacity to feel the nerves around the edges. It must be Dark, that hand of his.

 

The last thought that runs through her head is that she can’t even move her mouth enough to scream out more than a muffled grunt as he grips the edges of her face and jams his sword through her abdomen, blackflame burning a heavy hole through the worn leather layers.

 

She can feel the flickers of a soul clinging to the flame. A splintered thing, a remnant of affection.

 

It is the first time she can be certain that the sword takes pleasure in gutting her.

 

The ash will claim her any moment, and she will-

 

-it does not.

 

The ash does not claim her.

 

 _Anri_ does _._

 

She watches, through Anri’s eyes, as Sir Vilhelm tosses her body aside like a piece of spoiled meat. Anri watches his back, grips her sword, rushes him, but she watches the way the blood pools across the pages of the nearby tomes, soaking into the leather covers.

 

The glazed expression. The edges of the gash across her stomach, wet and dripping.

 

Anri has him pinned to the ground, a knee digging into his back and another trapping a leg as she wrests his blade from his grip, kicking it across the floor, and jams her own into his shoulder.

 

Vilhelm groans, and Anri does too, reaching around to tear his helmet off and throw it across the room. _Forgive me, my Lady…._

His lips are stained red with small bubbles of blood. He does not make eye contact for even a moment. To do so would be a concession, a renunciation of dignity. Instead, he twists against her armored body, writhing in vain, desperately reaching towards a small contraption in the back of the room, where Anri has kicked his sword.

 

_I swore an oath, but I have failed you… Lady Elfriede…_

 

Anri tugs his head back by the scruff of his hair with the hand that pulled at his helmet. _What’s that supposed to mean? What oath?_

He coughs – spits? – but goes limp in her grasp, leaving no answers – nothing but a strange key-shaped pendant, scattered, blood-soaked pages, and two dull-eyed corpses.

 

***

 

Anri does not talk to her at first, and she does not know what to say. She watches her walk out of the church and into the graveyard, leaning against a gnarled tree as she vomits into the dirt.

 

_Hear’st thou my voice still?_

_I can._

_Oh good._

_Anri-_

_-we really botched this, have we not?_

_It feels that way. But it often does._

_And he was writhing on the floor of a church for his weapon, and I feel like a prick because-_

_-you died in that manner too-_

_-yes, but he killed you, and we’ve done nothing to warrant the hostility but stick our noses where we’re unwelcome, but they have a point, do they not?_

_Friede wants me dead. The piece of her bound to that greatsword. She enjoyed it._

_So when is Liliane going to try and kill us?_

_The moment we outlive our usefulness to them, perhaps._

_I was joking._

_I’m… not certain I was._

_Gods. Fuck._

 

Anri kicks the tree. _I hate him. I hated him so much, but he had a point. Maybe especially because he had a point. I’ve felt trapped since Irithyll. Perhaps even prior, but certainly to Londor._

_To-_

_Not to thee._

_To the flame, then._

_The weight of the past, yes. The gods’ as well as mine. I almost wonder if there’s an escape. Have we changed nothing?_

Have they?

_I find myself reassured, at the very least, of one thing._

_What?_

_Sir Vilhelm was hiding something, and fought to the death to keep it from us. Or perhaps-_

_-someone? Then…_

Anri swallows, forcing her gaze back to the building before her. _Then perhaps our purpose here is not in vain._  

***

 

She tears the key from his throat.

 

The sword is wrapped in torn papers and bundled amongst the Ashen One’s things, as it recoils from her touch like an angry stray to the intruding hand of a child. Yuria will undoubtedly find it fascinating, should they decide to show her.

 

_We ought to. If we-_

If they go back.

 

She strips his corpse of his surcoat and ruined shirt and throws them in her own bag along with his helmet and drags him out into the graveyard.

 

Someone has left a shovel by the church gates. Just as well.

 

The dirt is near frozen solid, but breaking ground is hardly the most difficult task Anri’s faced in her life thus far. Beneath the hardened surface it gives way into crumbling sediment, cloying and clay-like and reeking of rot.

 

She turns to Vilhelm, who lies where she left him, dribbling blood onto the cobblestones, and hoists him into the ground.

 

There is no time for a proper marker, but she will not forego one. She pulls the silk scarf from her neck, and presses it to his bloody lips, smearing it across stone to spell a single word.

 

His name – his blood – will mark him long enough for the other Forlorn to memorialize him properly.  It is crude, but more than any Unkindled received.

 

_This was meant for thee. I return it to thee not as a shackle, but I do need thy shirt, and I fear it rude to not offer thee an exchange. Consider it a token of recompense._

The scarf is bound around his wound like a strange sash, and Sir Vilhelm disappears beneath the ground of Ariandel for good.

 

The other body is far trickier. She does not want to face it, for she’s never had to see her thus. She’s seen her die, to be certain, she’s _felt it,_ countless times – countless arrows, blades, claws _, teeth –_ but never apart from her Ash.

 

Not from the outside.

 

She cradles the body, gently lifting it in her arms. The corpse’s head rolls back, exposing the blanching neck.

 

Her wife has never been so heavy in her arms.

 

 _We ought to find flame._ The disembodied voice is strained.

_The chapel-_

_-Friede will not welcome us there, to be certain._

She will not.

 

So Anri marches onward, one step at a time, bearing the burden for them both.

 

***

 

The contraption shudders to a halt as the cage peels back to reveal a dismal-looking attic.

 

It’s empty, but for a rotting table and a figure-

 

– _is she **chained** to ‘t?_

 

Dressed in worn robes sized seemingly for a giant that dwarf her beneath massive folds of cloth is a young woman. She does not look up as Anri walks in.

_Excuse me, I will gladly be of aid to you, but I must ask, could you show me flame? Or the way to’t, if you know where in such a cold place ashes might linger yet-_

The woman turns her head sharply, and Anri takes a quick step back, hand flying to the grip of her blade. Her face carries faint traces of something ethereal, iridescent scales glinting softly in what little light filters through the iron bars of the window on the wall, barely visible.

 

_Thou’rt not Vilhelm._

 

Flinching, she nods, and moves the hand from her blade to lift her visor.

 

_He will trouble thee no more. But I presume he was thy captor?_

The strange woman nods gingerly.

 

 _Forgive me. I believe… I feel the scent of ash upon thee. I scented it not at first. Thou’rt the one of whom Uncle Gael spoke, the one to show me flame?_ She turns her attention back downwards, tracing absent-minded patterns with an elongated nail into the soft, pliant wood of the tabletop as she speaks.

_We both are._

_Oh. Well._

_Please, know’st thou of any fires?_

_Beyond this structure, a small pile of embers. Uncle Gael used to burn-_

_That’ll suffice, my Lady. My thanks._

There is nowhere kind or proper to lay the body for the time being, so Anri seats her by the window. Light, at the very least, seems fitting.

 

It is fortunate, Anri supposes, that the Ashen One had the habit of collecting whatever tools she came across even in spite of her inability to use them. She’d kept the crude lockpicks that Greirat had fashioned at Firelink after his capture at the High Wall once she’d come across his body atop the castle’s roof.

 

It’s also fortunate that Anri knows how to use them. She takes no time in getting to work on the shackles around the small woman’s wrists.

_Tis good. When this is done, I can return, for the door is open now, thanks to thee._

_Return whither?_

_Ariandel’s chapel. My studio is there._

_We shall join thee, then, once-_

_-_ she spares a glance for the knight’s - her wife's - lifeless body, resting against dusty stonework beneath barred windows. Stray snow flurries cluster around her hair, drifting in on the breeze.

 

_I’m still with thee._

_I know._

The painting woman stares at her, rubbing chafing wrists.

 

 _-once we’ve dealt with those who’d keep thee from thy duty._  

 

_***_

Gael’s old ashes are cold, frozen by the clime, though the coiled sword keeps the perpetual snowfall from blanketing them altogether. It takes merely a flick of Anri’s wrist to reignite the embers, and the remnants of her soul long conditioned to her old duty burn happily at the familiar sensation of warmth.

 

She shivers.

 

_How do we do this?_

_I know not. Thou’ve more experience than I, in this respect._

_I was born from thee and thy kindling._ This frozen, rotting landscape – a desolate corner of a torn scrap – is a far cry from a blazing kiln of legend.

 

But she has nothing to guide her, so she tries. She reaches for the flame, for the lingering remnants her wife made use of and shaped into a body for her that still course through her veins, and _pulls_ , drawing on ash, the embers that burn within her bloodstream, that litter the floor at her feet.

 

The bonfire burns brighter and brighter still, spurred on by proximity to its predecessor, resonating with something in them both.

 

Her fellow knight – her wife – does not return to the ash. _The ash returns to her,_ winding around her limbs and burning its way into her flesh, setting the skin alight and restoring the spark of life to her muscles, scaring over the gaping wound in her gut, and Anri watches, wide-eyed, until there is silence but for the roar of the flame around them and a pair of eyes snap open to meet her own, blazing. 

 

She understands, now, why the pilgrims of Londor crawled countless miles to watch this.

 

But they are not here, in the frozen painting - it is simply the two of them, her Ash warm in her arms, like soft sunlight, like the ash that surrounded her, gentle and smooth, when she crawled out of it, herself reborn.

***

 

The well-worn chair by the fire in Ariandel chapel is empty when they return. The central statue has shifted, revealing a passage down, but Friede is nowhere to be found.

 

Perhaps it's just as well. She has no idea how even to address the sister at this point.

 

Carved wooden ornamentation adorn the sides of the chapel, serpents twisting around faceless women, extending to the heights of the stone. Through the body of the hall, a deep, hoarse murmur resounds. At the end, instead of an altarpiece, a massive figure curls over a carved brass vessel, whispering to himself as he stares into the belly of the bowl. 

 

_I see flame, flickering, once again._

His voice trembles as he speaks, unsteady and uneasy. _Not enough blood yet shed._ She exchanges a quick glance with Anri. Will he weep?

 

Will he speak with them, perhaps, or is he too far lost to grief, to defeat, to whatever seems to have consumed him?

 

Whose blood has not been shed, has not spilled to meet his demand? And how much  _has?_

 

_My flail… Bring me my flail…_

 

His arms curl around the vessel, drawn-out and lithely muscular, tapering into extended claws that tap nervously against each other and the hard metal, echoing softly through the chamber.

 

He does not pay them any mind, for the bowl’s contents and his own seeming misery far outvalue the presence of curious interlopers.

 

Until they peer over the edge to meet his eyes, attempting to garner his attention (or catch a glimpse of the sight within).

 

(It was a mere spark. Nothing more.)

 

(Though Gael did mention Ariandel feared flame, sought the dark above all, feared what would happen should his painted world burn away and be redrawn anew by a different hand.)

 

Ariandel did not raise a single clawed hand to them, simply asked them to bring Friede, begged for his flail, groaned as the single spark in the bowl flickered.

 

It was a different kind of broken to Gundyr, she supposes. A man on the verge of losing his home to rot of a different kind, who cannot bear to relinquish it to his descendants for fear of being forsaken once more – for the world has not been kind to the Forlorn-

 

-but then she thinks back to buzzing around in Anri’s mind, feeling her fists clench, staring at a young woman in chains.

 

Did he know, then, what was done in his name?

 

As her lips part to speak, an icy draft blows through the room from the chapel passageway, carrying pinpricks of frost that burn the back of her neck. The lit lamps flicker, shrouding the room in strange shadows as the soft crunch of bare feet against frost announces the presence of Ariandel’s confidant.

 

Friede approaches, slowly, gingerly, face hardened as she speaks, eyes focused on the two knights. There’s bitterness, but Elfriede burns with it, cold and heavy, and for the first time the Lord of Londor truly can tell that _Elfriede too is Ash._

 

_Fret not father, we have no need of thy flail._

 

For Friede brandishes something far more sinister – a wicked, curved blade, something ancient and familiar that she’s seen, she’s certain of it, in the depths of Aldrich’s soul, in a dream perhaps-

 

_Tis only the flame quivering at misguided Ash._

Ariandel’s flame twitches with delight at their proximity, begging to be reborn anew. Vilhelm’s fragmentary flame quivered with malice at their intrusion. But she too can feel the First Flame within herself, for it remembers Friede, and it recalls her betrayal.

 

To be Ash is to be misguided. None of them are exempt from this.

 

And so they stand, pinned between a hungry fire and the reaper's blade, as Friede stares them down with determined fury and remarkable restraint.

 

_I will snuff out these ashes for good._

 

***

 

Ariandel watches as they gut each other. 

 

Or rather, he doesn’t. He stares into his bowl, transfixed by the spark, silent as a mouse, as Elfriede tears through her shoulder, through Anri’s calf, as she bludgeons her across the ribs with the flat of her blade, as Anri catches her, luckily, in the arm.

 

Elfriede is fast, but they’ve had time in this frozen world to learn to cover each other, and while the battle is bloody, it’s not long before she’s face down in the frost, bleeding into the stonework.

 

Anri staggers to her feet, catching her breath, and they turn desperately towards the hulking mass of a man, for fear of retribution-

 

-but he sits atop his strange throne, hands clutching his prized vessel, and stares at the spark, unmoved.

 

Just once, perhaps, they can resolve things with conversation-

 

-but the Flame has other ideas, she realizes in horror, Anri tugging on her elbow, because Friede’s blood is draining far too quickly, seeping into the spaces between the stones, almost as if it’s being drawn out, drawn towards the metal vessel, and they slowly step back as it begins pooling around Ariandel’s fingertips, clambering up the sides and through the base-

 

For she was Ash, and the spark within has long sought that which might rekindle a Flame.

 

Ariandel’s head jumps as the sparks dance within, from his bloodied fingers to the corpse of his dear Friede sprawled thus across the stone and finally his gaze fixes on them, those Ash he knew not but took _everything_ he still had from him, and _howls_ like a dying man, clinging to the remains of whatever final tether he might still find to keep him from hollowing.

 

He screams, and he keens, and he takes the burning bowl and _slams_ it into the blood, igniting the room, igniting-

 

-igniting _Friede,_ who rises like Lorian, reborn from the flame, rekindled, for Ariandel has already lost that which he holds dear, but he will be damned if he does not take them down with him.

 

_And he will not die alone, forsaken, Forlorn._

The chapel burns. The wooden iconography crumbles into ashes, the broken pews catch light, and far away, a hooded figure in another church sits by a statue of Velka and stares as a small corner of canvas between his fingers ignites with a tiny spark.

 

The slave knight grins. He can trust in himself for his Lady’s final task, though it will be considerably more challenging.

 

***

 

Friede will not _die._

She claws her way back up, burning darker amongst the flames that now consume Ariandel, spouting bursts of blackflame as she spins and carves arcs of it across the hall.

 

Ariandel resurrects her with a dying wish, or the faith of the painting's Forlorn in their savior transforms her into something beyond what she once was. They do not have time to ponder it, because despite how many times her scythes tear through the joints of their armor, rend their flesh and rip the breath from their lungs, _Ariandel burns._

 

The chapel is drenched with the burning blood of ash, of lords, and it burns too brightly to allow them to extinguish. The painting peels at the edges, varnish setting alight like the world seemed to catch from a few drops of blood. One woman’s life.

 

_Was it like this in the kiln?_

 

Anri doesn’t answer, because she watches Anri die, an offhand scythe tear through the joint of her clavicle, and shakily climb to her feet several seconds later, desperately lunging to cut in with unsteady hands to deflect a blow that might have caught _her_.

 

She dies as well. She loses count with how long the fight seems to drag on, her head heavy from the smell of smoke and burning skin. At a particularly bad moment, she’s backed against a statue hard enough to crack several ribs and catches a blast of blackflame to the face before she can raise her shield.

 

But she comes to with a scythe several inches deep in her chest and another burning its way through her sword arm, and is gone within seconds.

 

This is maddening. The fire burns, the battle rages on: beyond fire and flame and all thoughts of victory, but she merely wants the peace of death for half a second.

 

_I only wanted to know if I committed a grievous error. I merely sought thy counsel._

 

She strikes hard, heavy purposeful blows, as Anri darts between the two of them, cutting in when she can as Friede swings. The flames lick at her heels, her muscles cramp and strain from the overexertion, working twice as fast to mend lethal tears and force her back to her feet even as she just wants to lie there and let the ground take her.

 

Soon she can’t even feel the fire.

 

She doesn’t know who strikes the final blow, all she knows is that the room blessedly stops spinning, Friede stops moving for a _third_ time, and she’s stumbling over to Anri without thinking twice, knees buckling to the hot stone, her bloodied, bruised head bumping against Anri’s scraped-up breastplate, pulling her into a pained embrace as they both desperately try to catch their breath.

 

Let her rise a fourth time. If she really wants to kill them that badly, she can do it.

 

A faceless statue watches over them, clinging to each other before a sputtering bowl of bloodied ash, battered and weary but together.

 

Ariandel - the painter and the painted - burns.

 

***

 

The woman’s studio is small but homely, packed with tightly woven canvasses and glass jars of strange pigments and an easel that dwarfs her form as much as her robe.

 

Gael’s lady rubs her hands over chafed wrists, staring at a blank canvas, muttering to herself beneath her breath with such focus that she doesn’t notice Anri or herself.

 

_Those who aren’t ken to fire cannot paint a world… Those absorbed by fire, must not paint a world… Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten, Mother-_

 

She shares a glance with Anri, and coughs. They don’t wish to bother her, but eavesdropping such things is neither seemly nor why they’ve come.

 

They haven’t even burned down the Cathedral of the Deep, yet, and she promised Anri a date.

 

_Oh, apologies. Ashen One, it is good to see thee in better circumstances._

_Indeed. It is good to make thy acquaintance properly, my lady. I trust the flame is sufficient._

_Yes, my thanks, Ashen Ones. I can almost see the flame from here, and you’ve set the old varnish alight. Soon Uncle Gael will bring me the pigment, if he can but find it._

_Thou’ve many pigments here, and have painted many beautiful portraits. Does such a painting require a special kind?_

_A very special kind, Ashen One. Pigment coloured like the dark soul of man. For twas painted in blood, this world of Ariandel, and so must be the next._

She thinks back to Friede's body on the floor, Ariandel begging for his flail. Not enough yet shed.  _In_ … _blood?_

At the same time, Anri sputters.  _The dark soul of man?_

_Ariamis’ painted world was painted with the blood of the dark soul, before twas hidden away by the Lord of Sunlight. Father Ariandel restored Ariamis’ work with his own blood, rather than repaint it altogether._

_That’s a tall order for thy uncle._

_It will not be an easy journey for him, but I hope the new painting will be to him a gentle home. He has gone in search of the Dreg Heap at world’s end. I wonder if he has found it._

_My lady, what did you mean by “those who aren’t ken to fire cannot paint a world?”_

_Oh – my father, Ashen One, bore a portion of Lord Gwyn’s soul within him. But, while fire is necessary, to spark life, and to burn away rot-_

_-obsession with maintaining a flickering flame will drive a world to ruin, yes._

Anri nods. _We know that all too well._

_Well, I should be off to work. I’ve much sketching to accomplish, in the meanwhile._

_Actually,_ Anri says, pursing her lips, _I’ve a proposition for thee, if it is not too bold._

_Speak thy mind._

_There are few god children left after Aldrich came through._

_Oh. Yes. He tore my elder sister hence, at the prompting of Sulyvahn. I was too young, too well concealed in purpose and history to be known to him._

_My apologies, my lady, that must have been-_

_-Then he was successful, in his aims?_ The painter pointedly deflects the subject from herself, tapping a fingernail to her canvas.

She shakes her head, proudly, yet hyperaware of Anri gritting her teeth all the same. _One other survived. A sibling of the Darkmoon, but who I suspect shares thy parentage, by the name of Yorshka._

They survived. Aldrich did not kill them all – neither gods nor men, nor Anri. He did not take Anri from her, hollow her, hollow the both of them. He did not find Yorshka atop the tower. He did not survive. He did not consume the world beneath his rot.

 

They survived.

 

But he did an awful lot of damage along the way, and she can see it in the clench of Anri’s jaw, in the distant, melancholy look in the painter’s eyes.

_Draconic blood, thou meanst._

The Ashen One nods. _She seemed lonely, atop her tower. I was the first she’d met aside from her brother since the saint of the deep took the city._

Anri continues. _Anor Londo is, for the time being, unsalvageable, and Yorshka has no intention of taking it back at the moment. I know thy work requires focus, but would’st thou perhaps wish for company?_

_Thy uncle must have been away overlong, and we have taken the subject of thy portraiture, thy captor though she was._

The woman pauses, eyes focused on an unfixed point in space, the scales on her wrists glinting in the soft firelight filtering in through the circular attic window. _Her brother was the Darkmoon?_

_She told us as much. She has taken up command of his blades, in his absence._

_I should rather like to meet her._

***

They watch the Cathedral of the Deep burn from a comfortable vantage point atop the old tower of Farron Swamp, where they can sit and breathe without fear of something crawling up to claw at their heels.

 

The mossy stone is damp and slick beneath the metal of their armor, and even this far away they can smell the smoke amidst the thick acrid stench of the swamp, the humid air comfortably warm with some distance from the poison.

 

The Cathedral is a blazing light in the darkness beyond, crumbling as she sits with her arm around Anri. Her wife nestles in, curled against her side, hair tickling her cheek, though the muscles in her shoulder scream at every small movement. Anri winces softly, likely not faring much better.

 

They’d kept it simple, and ridden the elevator to the rafters. She’d suggested firebombs, but Anri felt it more appropriate to channel flame personally. They’d hit the structural beams from both sides and gotten out before the blaze fully spread, and lit what they could of the cracked wood in the gardens up for good measure, remembering how deep the maggots had burrowed into the groundwater, the desecrated earth.

 

It’s Anri who breaks the silence first.

 

_Can we rest here a while?_

_Do you want to go back after, to be certain we got everything?_ The graveyard there was a self-perpetuating mess, flourishing even without being fed more corpses, and if that were to spread to the road of sacrifices, beyond, and she could have put an end to it-

 

_Frankly, I’m bruised to shit, and it appears to me like thou wouldst rather be anywhere but Londor at the moment._

Anri stares up at her, soft yet scrutinizing, like she’s trying to read her face without staring directly into her soul, asking without taking, waiting for an explanation, and she’s touched by the subtle sweetness of the gesture, because, well.

 

They’re not here for her.

 

_I don’t think grand responsibility agrees with me._

_Friede got to thee._

_I don’t want to deal with the fallout of having killed her, explaining ourselves to Liliane and Yuria, with-_

_-playing the part of a Lord again?_

_I think thy idea to bring Yorshka to the woman was a good one._

_At the very least, it buys us a day or so. But more importantly,_ and Anri runs her thumb across her gauntleted wrist, _they both seemed in want of companionship. Fate’s funny like that. I felt we ought not turn it down._

_We could keep helping her, if it appeals to thee._

_What, go off on some mad quest to world’s end in search of the red-hooded slave knight?_

_Leave Londor. Live as we used to, on the road, but together. Provide aid to a well-meaning woman with an impossible task before her._

_Just forsake everything? All those hopes they’ve pinned on us?_

_Are we not figureheads?_

_To be perfectly honest, I cannot truly tell. But we could leave, for a short while. Get our heads in order, see if we could find Gael. Help him a tad._

_They’d be interested in what he seeks, after all. The Dark Soul of Man, and its blood. How can a soul bleed?_

_I wonder the same, and yet…_

She’d felt it too. The usurped flame burns through her bloodstream, bound therein. Friede’s blood alone kindled Ariandel. The fact that she carries her soul even now, bundled away amongst her things, proves it.

 

She idly traces fingertips across Anri’s neck, where dark streaks of corruption once climbed, spiderlike, through her veins.

 

_There seems a connection worth learning more of, if anything to understand the power at our fingertips._

Anri sighs. _That feels nice._

 

_We should return beforehand, if we do plan on setting out for longer. I do need to speak with Yuria._

_In the morning._

_In the afternoon. Anor Londo in the morning._

As they lie there, watching the glow of the firelight, it calls to mind memories of Irithyll  - each bruised, frost-chilled, and uneasy, but warmed nonetheless by the solace of the other's company. Below them, the Old Wolf of Farron sleeps, curled within itself as they lie, curled together, the flames of the cathedral flickering in the darkness, dancing across the hazy starlit sky.

 

***

 

Londor’s repository is smaller than the grand library of Lothric – the sprawling archives, overflowing with boundless scrolls and endless supplies of wax – but it is still impressive for a religious institution.

 

She finds Yuria in conversation with Orbeck, of all people, something about sorceries and Oolacile and pilgrims and far-flung, poorly translated knowledge.

 

_Good to see thou’rt making friends, Yuria. Orbeck, may I steal her from thee a moment?_

Her tutor – her friend – smiles and nods. _Goodness, certainly. Good to see thee back in one piece. It’s been a bit longer than we thought it’d be. She was about to send her hounds for thee._

Yuria rolls her eyes. _We were mildly concerned, but I’m quite confident in her ability to take care of herself amidst a burning cathedral of cannibalistic heretics, given what she’s already accomplished._

_Actually,_ she pipes up, _we did have a reason for the delay. I would speak with thee somewhere quiet, Yuria. Orbeck, I apologize, I will have her back to you shortly, but-_

The disinclusion of Orbeck immediately draws Yuria’s attention.

 

- _but it regards her affairs._

_Of course. I will see what can be done regarding our translation project, in the meanwhile._

Yuria eyes her with a mixture of concern and curiosity. They stopped on their way back to clean up to the best of their ability, but the bruises have yet to fade. _My Lord, might I suggest we speak in the belltower? We shan’t be bothered there._

_Very well._

The trip up is quiet, but for the occasional passing nod of greeting to clergy and pilgrims roaming the Sable Church’s wide halls.

 

 _How fares thy spouse?_ Yuria’s feet are quick and light, and she has to move quickly to keep pace – her muscles still ache from residual notes of frostbite, wounds too quickly healed over – but she’s pleasantly surprised to hear a genuine note of concern in the other woman’s voice.

 

_The same as I, I believe. Our travel took us a bit farther than we expected. She’s filling in thy sister as we speak._

_But thou came’st to me?_

_We have something more to discuss. As do Anri and Liliane._

 

The spire of the church is a narrow climb, the steep stairwell spilling out unto a small belfry that could perhaps comfortably fit three or four at most, but it offers a gorgeous view of Londor’s evening sky, the setting sun, the ascending stars, their reflections across the gently rising tide.

 

Yuria clears her throat, arms crossed over her black gown. _Where desirest thou to start? Where did thy travels take thee, if they drew thy attention from the Cathedral?_

_A strange painted world, that once adorned the halls of Anor Londo. Formerly of Ariamis, currently of Ariandel, soon to be neither._

_There are stories of Ariamis’ old work in the library, yes, but its restoration at Ariandel’s hands is news to me. It was a prison of the old gods for the forbidden and occult – a repository of the accursed and misunderstood, and many of Velka’s followers ended up exiled there._

_A piece thereof was brought to us in the Cathedral by a faithful of Velka, or servant to one of her children, at least, who described a woman to us who caught our attention._

She pulls Friede’s soul from her things – twisted, seeped in strength, unexpectedly heavy and cold to the touch for something so wreathed in dark flames.

 

Yuria blanches.

 

_That…_

_I don’t feel this belongs to me._

_That is the soul of my sister. Elfriede._

_She was far stronger than thou gave’st her credit for, Yuria. If thou desirest, I can tell thee how I came by this, and what became of her. But she gave me few explanations for abandoning Londor._

She gives Yuria the bare bones of the affair, sparing her the doubt, the countless gruesome deaths, the uncertainty.

 

_...She lost herself to the role she played, but fought to the very last of her essence to safeguard the world whose inherited mantle she bore._

_Then I would’st ask of thee one small kindness._

_Of course, Yuria._

_If thou wouldst, let her soul nourish thee. She made her decision not to return to us. But remember those who stayed by her to the end, in the shadows cast by fire, as thou wear thy own mantle._

_Though the fire cast a pall over the both of them, Ariandel and Vilhelm cast shadows of their own. But, I will._

 

_I do not disagree with thee._

_And yet, I agree with thee all the same. Ariandel intended to provide a home for those turned away, and his obsession did not center around self-actualization or attainment of divinity through its consumption, but with a fear of losing one’s self and sanctuary. Vilhelm was devoutly loyal to thy sister and died for her sake._

_The world is rarely simple, is it not?_

_***_

The grotto of Londor’s church is quiet when Anri enters, but for the gentle hum of a melody on Liliane’s lips. Londor’s youngest sister kneels before the altar, before the cracked statue of her goddess, head bowed in prayer, singing softly to herself.

 

_Thou’ve a lovely voice._

Liliane pauses at the sound of Anri’s voice, and without rising, addresses her. _Thou’ve been away overlong. Did’st thou find something of interest in the cathedral?_

_I found thee a present, Sister._

She pulls the cold iron hangman’s helm from her things, places it on the altar where Liliane’s hands were but a moment before clasped along with the bundle of accompanying fabric.

 

Liliane traces the thin lines of the frost-glazed metalwork with calloused fingertips, her brow wrinkling in confusion. She runs her hands along the bloodied velvet surcoat, still damp in places, the edges rough with their intricate gold threadwork.

 

Her eyes, Anri thinks, only brighten fully when she feels the tears in the tattered silk shirt.

 

_A worthwhile present, and worthy of a delay. My thanks, Ser Anri._

_We got no answers from him. Only more questions. I expect we shall set out shortly to seek answers to those we can find._

_This is enough, I think, for now._

Anri rises to exit, but is stopped by a delicate yet forceful grip on her shoulder, as Liliane's fingers press firmly against her pauldron.

_But, Ser Anri, I expect a worthwhile tale._

 

Her fingertips leave traces of crimson, small bloody prints, still wet from the still-damp surcoat where they rested, phantom remnants that follow Anri as she walks out into the night like the ghost of the man himself. 

 

***

 

_What art thou painting, sister?_

_A cold and dark and gentle place. A world much like this one, but different, and of mine own creation._

_But thou hast no paint._

_I still wait for its delivery. Mine uncle must first fetch it. He should not be away overlong._

_Tell me of thy uncle._

_Uncle Gael? He’s a gentle, kindly man. He would travel to the ends of the earth for mother, and for me. He raised me here, in this painted world, along with the help of our sister, who kept me thus concealed._

_I met Priscilla not, though I saw her once from my tower. I think I would have liked to have met her._

Yorshka stares off through the window at the rising embers, wringing her hands uncomfortably in her lap on the borrowed stool she sits upon. She does not know what to say to this woman, does not know what to do with the realization that she had and lost more family than she realized.

_She fought bravely, until the end. For her own sake, and for the Darkmoon._

_Perhaps, I could put a moon in the painting, for thee and our half-brother._

_I think he’d appreciate that. Hast thou given thought to what creatures might inhabit thy new world?_

_I’ve made considerations. Dost thou have an idea?_

_Well, what if it were populated by creatures of the air, or other winged things – not a dragon, perhaps a crow, for I’ve always imagined thus, and that way they can travel to see the moon up close-_

The painter laughs, tearing her eyes from the canvas to see Yorshka’s face brighten, animated with delight. _Didst thou not see the Corvians who inhabit this one on thy way in?_

_But, consider – winged people!_

_Like butterflies? Angels?_

As the painted world burns, a faceless goddess watches her surviving daughters smile for the first time in sunless days, endless nights, as they plan to transform her own prison – an exile’s bastille, a rotting sanctuary for the forsaken and forlorn – into a gentle and loving home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seath is not an ethical scientist (to put it kindly), is hella paranoid and on the anti-Gwyn train by the time painting lady would be conceived (likely during the DS1 timeline since there's no record of her in Ariamis). Also Velka is sly as shit and would be a hundred percent aboard the pro-strategy of using Seath's raging paranoia and horny on main tendencies to fuck up Gwyn's evil painting jail "i will hide everything i'm scared of" plans, especially since she likely knows his number is nearly up. Also someone clearly fucked a dragon again. Like, that's not even remotely arguable at this point. 
> 
> So, for the purposes of this fic, we're going with Yorshka and Painting Lady as both Seath/Velka kids. For the confusion factor, both those girls refer to Gwyndolin, correctly, as "brother," because he is - just, in Yorshka's case, it was some conversation to figure out that yeah, all three do share the same mother, but she and Painting Lady do in fact have the same father as well.
> 
> Though I suppose he had a bit of Gwyn in him when he fathered her (or maybe them both), so.... that counts?
> 
> Anyway, off to the Dreg Heap. That will also likely be a similarly long chapter, and then a short epilogue, and that's a wrap!
> 
> There will be a happy ending, but next chapter is going to be predictably brutal. I'm so fucking psyched.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah so IRL medical issues intervened. Good news is, those are now in the process of finally being treated, which is nice.
> 
> Updated content warnings, particularly for canon-compliant implied suicide, for the ends of sirris' questline. Ringed City lore speculation, references to DS1 firekeeper lore and how it carries into DS3, so passing references to body mutilation. If you've read my other DS3 fic, it's pretty consistent with that.
> 
> Ringed City is naturally a heavier chapter, so, as with the past chapter, if you're binging the fic and it's like 3 am, maybe get some rest, because this bastard is long. Hopefully that also makes up for the delayed posting.

The ash blanketing the kiln has lost its omnipresent heat, now nothing more than fine dirt with the faintest trace of warmth beneath the cool surface, indistinguishable from the natural heat of the earth.

 

The flowers, smothered beneath the explosion, poke through, charred petals flame-touched and burnt, smoking at the edges, but somehow still alive.

 

She plucks one with a gentle tug, and its stem gives, yielding. The edges threaten to crumble as she rolls the stalk between the finger and thumb of her gauntlet, small pieces of charcoal giving way to the pressure.

 

Pieces of ash.

 

She tucks the broken thing behind her ear, smearing part of her cheek with soot, and pulls another, offering it to the woman at her side.

 

_It’s beautiful, Ashen One._

_Thou’rt beautiful._

Anri takes the charred flower and tucks it into the braid of her bun with gentle fingers, careful not to crush it, to reduce it to crumbling dust.

 

They’d come to the kiln in search of leads, a view of what might lie beyond the fabled site of Lordran, dregs of ash beneath the explosion they’d caused – she’d caused.

 

After all, it made sense to seek the refuse of world’s end beneath the world’s beginning. The kiln set everything in motion.

 

The flame was found here, after all. So was the Dark Soul of man. Those seeking it must have found the kiln a reasonable place to begin their journey, now that they’d opened the way.

 

So here they stand, amidst rocky, ash-covered crags, descending with jagged edges into nothingness below. But there is nothing here as well, sans the remnants of burnt petals, the hilts of charred swords of once-proud silver-then-black knights buried beneath ashes, blackened and rusted and flaking cracked bits of charcoal. Where the flame once stood, there are no embers.

 

All that remains are a series of boot prints, once fresh, now weathered where the wind pulled traces of ash across them. Before long, they’ll be worn away entirely.

 

She kicks experimentally at the ashes, gently now, only to see how far they fall – how far the seemingly-endless chasm below the kiln stretches, before they fade entirely, but her boot meets solid matter.

 

She expects the telltale strike of metal on metal, or else the grating crunch of grinding charcoal, but the toe of her solleret catches on a small strip of something soft, and she pulls back to find a piece of worn red fabric.

 

A torn scrap of Gael’s garb. It’s hot to the touch. Far too much so for the surrounding ash.

 

She stares at the ground, and, where there was nothing before, for there _was, there **was** nothing there, _by means of some illusion lifted the tell-tale ashes of a tiny bonfire smolder still, the other edge of the fabric tied to the sword within.

 

_Anri, come hither._

_Had this always been here?_ Countless pilgrims, countless ages – not to mention _Yuria_ – cannot all have passed it by, unnoticing.

_Perhaps the Flame allowed us to see past some concealed veil._

_If so, then-_

Then why could Gael? And wherefore did Gael leave a trail?

 

She prays – to whom, she is not sure – that it is in the event they succeeded and thought to offer aid, and not foresight, in the event he doubts he may not.

  
Velka is, after all, the goddess of fortune as well as fate.

 

***

 

The dreg heap lies before them, a mad cluster of ruined towers and odd edifices. The valley below is thick with fog, the jutting crags sticking out at odd angles dusted with piles of ash like a heavy snow.

 

Peering over one of the cliffs is a peculiar figure, an old woman bundled in pilgrim’s garb, clutching a gnarled staff, straining to see beyond. Her clothes are threadbare and worn, and she nods approvingly as they approach to gaze over the precipice alongside her.

 

_Oh, your head’s square on your shoulders, is it? I thought that clamouring tin can was the last, but here we go again._

 

The woman shuffles slightly, turning to give them a cautious once-over from beneath her tightly bundled hood, her own face obscured beneath’t.

 

_What’s it you want from this old stone-humped hag? I’ve nothing for you, you know, not a smithereen. I just like to stand here and take in the view._

_What’s this about a clamouring tin can?_

_Ach, some knight fellow who didn’t know when to leave well enough alone._

_Well, we don’t mean to bother thee, we’ve no business in particular with thee._

_Keep your marbles intact, then, loves._

Anri bows her head slightly, a show of courtesy. _It is a lovely view. Thou’ve certainly admirable pastimes._

The Ashen One nods. _Dregs of world’s end are certainly something to behold._

_Well, at the close of the Age of Fire, they say all lands meet at the end of the earth. Great kingdoms and anaemic townships will be one and the same. The great tide of human enterprise, all for naught._

Something about the manner of the woman takes her off-guard, like she can see through the piece of her so affected by the view – into the deep churning pit within her soul that’s felt uneasy since Ariandel. Since Londor.

 

Since Anor Londo.

 

_That’s why I’m so taken by this grand sight. This must be what it’s like to be a god._

Is that what it’s like, she wonders? To stare down at everything – the cumulative worth of history – watching it collapse unto itself amidst the dregs of humanity? The remnants of empires, everything you’ve ever built, knowing the others are gone and dead, and that you will, in time, undoubtedly follow or damn the world twice over?

 

She wonders if it’s how the Darkmoon felt, as the priests of the Deep crawled upon the ruins of the once-glorious Anor Londo.

 

_Or Yorshka,_ Anri adds, telepathically.

Out loud, Anri asks instead, _What do you think is at the center?_

_Oh, best not be going too far down there, little lass. The tin can headed thence, searching after ill-fated myths._

_Did he perchance wear a red hood?_

_No hoods, just tin._

_Then we shan’t be chasing him, unless he’s been a nuisance to thee._

_Don’t trouble yourself, lassie. He wouldn’t stop pestering me after the Ringed City._

_That would be the subject of the ill-fated myths, yes?_

_Aye._

_Might we hear them? We’re quite fond of stories, and we’re in search of a friend who’s gone chasing after one._

_Well,_ and the woman points to a gleam in the distance – a tiny cluster of golden spires – _the Ringed City is said to be at world’s end, past this heap of rubbish, as far as one could go._

_That’s not terribly ill-fated, is it? Unless the Dreg Heap is full of dregs of monsters, too._

The old woman shakes her head with a dry chuckle. _More than dregs, lass._

_Oh. Well… great._

_You’d better think twice if you’re considering seeking your friend there. It’s a forsaken place, walled off by the gods to contain the pygmies._

Suddenly, a moment of idle curiosity crystalizes into yet another dangerous destination. A creation of the old gods of Lordran, yet another prison for heretics – the _pygmies_ , at that?

_Unfortunately, that sounds like precisely the place our friend might have gone to in search of his myth._

_The Dark Soul is better left well alone._

_That may be the case, but we must find our friend._

_You’re not willing to reconsider, are you?_

Anri shakes her head. _We cannot forsake him, nor the lady he serves._

She too nods. _It’d be ill spirited to abandon him, but we’ll take thy warnings to heart._

_Well, that’s just fine. It’s a rare thing, to have a true duty. Don’t go and take it for granted, I suppose. Won’t do any better than this, not you or that poor tin can. You’re all a little too brave for your own good._

_Our thanks, ma’am, for thy aid._

_Don’t run off and die, loves. It’s a nicer view with you in it._

They bid the old woman farewell, wandering alongside cliff’s edge to chart a path into the ravine, through the valley, between the crumbling vestiges of kingdoms long gone. Another scrap of red fabric flutters in the breeze, bound to a piece of wrought iron wedged between the stones of a crumbling tower. Below them lies a pile of heaped ashes, collapsed remnants of a royal wall bridging a gap between two fallen chapels.

Anri strokes the fabric absentmindedly, and turns her gaze towards the sprawling vista, the remnants of Lothric, of Irithyll, of kingdoms familiar to her only in the ancient heraldry of bygone pieces of armor she’s scavenged along the way. _Did we do this?_

_It feels like the floor’s fallen out from under the universe._

_I know thou’ve been to the past, in the Graves. Is this the inevitable future, or the dawning age?_

_I can’t say, but it feels as if-_

Something is warping the world, messing with her eyes. The world should not be thus, look thus, contract thus, unto one focal point.

 

_Time has always flowed strangely since the cycles of flame and dark took hold. Perhaps such strangeness seems to warp its surroundings here, too? I know not, I’m not a scholar, we can always consult Orbeck if we wish._

_Orbeck confessed his learning is almost all recent - he will know nothing of the matter. What if this contraction is owed to our usurpation of the flame?_

_More like than not, it’s owed to some lock on the gods’ city. Containing the pygmies seems not to be a simple matter. But I feel thy unease. Particularly if this is the ultimate fate of the world._

_But,_ and she continues, _Anri, if this truly is world’s end, there’s nobody else I’d rather be with._

_I feel much the same._

_I’ve a question for thee, though._

_Ask, and I shall answer._

_If this **is** world’s end, Anri, or even not – if we succeed, assist Gael, help his lady, fetch some paint and an ancient soul walled off in an impenetrable city forbidden to all by Gwyn himself – what dost thou wish to do afterwards? _

_I don’t understand thy question._

_We’ve Londor, certainly. We could return and rule. We could dedicate our lives to making our mutual friends happy, fetching old tomes and texts and flowers. I could come up with suggestions. But I must know – what is it thou wish to do with the remainder of thy life?_

 

There’s a pause, a gentle wind ferrying dregs of ash between them as Anri turns towards her, eyes hard, meeting her own.

 

_I know not. But, when I figure it out, I shall inform thee straightaway._

 

The old woman watches over the couple as they descend through the dreg heap, biting withered lips as she sees twisted murkmen swarm them, crossing gnarled fingers when they draw the attention of the bulky knight that bashed the tin can’s armor right in. She murmurs soft prayers as they duck from blasting miracles, and well, if the beams shift ever so slightly, well…

 

They remain blissfully unaware of their guardian angel.

 

***

 

They find the aforementioned tin can amidst the pooling poison of the valley, as they duck between gnarled roots of petrified trees to hide from the perpetual onslaught of the angels above, nursing burns from beams of light and caustic acid alike.

 

The man, encased in looted heavy armor, could perhaps be mistaken for a tin can by one unfamiliar with such plate, given the cacophony uttered by the ill-fitted pieces when he rises from his small bonfire to greet them.

 

_Oh, look at you, you’ve got your heads screwed on correct. Fantastic - to meet kindred spirits on this godforsaken crag!_

He doesn’t even wait for them to respond, cutting her half-uttered syllable off with a hearty handshake.

 

_Call me Lapp. I can’t remember my real name, so let’s just go with that. I’ve a feeling we’ll all make a fabulous team. Oh, in all honesty, there’s something I should tell you. I’m… a hollow. Yes, I try to play it off, but I haven’t a clue about my past. Who I was, or what I lived for. Not even my own blessed name._

_So where’d you get Lapp?_

_Dunno. Just sounded right._

She stares at the blank, faceless helmet incredulously, too woozy with blood loss to question how someone could still muster such energy in such a place, never mind his story. Anri nods along absent-mindedly, slumping down by the fire to start binding her wounds. Lapp takes it their silence as encouragement.

_Anyway, that’s why I’ve come here, searching – for the purging monument, in the Ringed City. Where the pygmies who found the Dark Soul at the dawn of fire reside._

_Oh._ That rings true. _The old woman in the dreg heap mentioned as much._

_Indeed! Well, that’s the long and short of it, so if I completely forget who you are, don’t be wrath with me! C’mon, what else can I say – I’m a bloody hollow, for heaven’s sake!_

There are a million questions they could ask him. But, amidst the pain in her head, the ringing in her ears – vague memories of hurried footsteps, the dead, lifeless eyes of friends, the fear of a greeting being met with another blade to the gut – she settles on one:

 

_Shouldn’t you be more concerned about that?_

He shrugs, armored plates clanking together.

 

_No point in worrying about something until it’s within my power to change._

***

 

They stumble over the edge of a cliff, following Gael’s breadcrumb trail towards the trace sparkle of gold on the horizon, into a ruin-filled pit.

 

Four eyes stare back at them, burning like little black coals.

 

The demons shuffle out of the shadows like spiders drawn to a sudden light as the embers licking at the heels of their boots illuminate the dying grass and broken ruins, a heaping mass of ashes, the ancient remnants of a once-proud flame.

 

The pair of creatures claw their way across cracked stones and collapsed pillars, crushing crumbling structures beneath heavy wings and hooked feet as they rush the intruders with a screech and an explosive fury.

 

Between the poison smog that leaves her retching and the sheer mass of the pair of them, the fight becomes chaotic quickly. The second demon catches her with a burst of flame while she’s trying to keep track of the claws, tail, _and_ mouth of the other beast, and she screams as her knees buckle beneath her, the smell of burning flesh clinging to the membranes of her nostrils.

 

She drags her body across the floor by the blunted tip of her charred greatsword and her other elbow while her legs slowly regenerate from the impact of the blast, ducking and crawling beneath the claws of the beast. Anri is quick behind, weaving over with a small catalyst to expedite the process, to divert their attention, to do _something, anything-_

 

_Lorian drags himself across the floor. She drags herself across the ruined cobblestones. Why have they not payed a price for what they’ve done?_

 

Anri must have killed the other, for the survivor howls, something bitter and inhuman and deeply, deeply _pained,_ a hopeless harrowing scream, and its body burns rejuvenated with spiraling flames – too hot, like all the others, for their fire, their source of life, is far too chaotic and burns out far too soon.

 

For its eyes are empty already.

 

She wonders, hazily, if they were once trapped in a similar cycle, the demons. Not light and dark, but life and death – the perpetual struggle to rekindle a chaotic flame that threatens to consume them all.

 

The Demon King guarded the Chaos Flame, she knows. And it went out, without rekindling. There will be no more demons after this age.

 

This Prince is all that’s left of his kind. And thus he’s sought out a human flame, or the ruins of one.

 

Perhaps it’s a mercy, what they’ve stumbled into doing here.

 

_Why did you come?_ She wonders, _Why did’st thou seek the Ringed City?_

 

The shrine around them, crumbling and desolate, collapses into dust beneath the impact of heavy claws and stray fireballs, the blow of a body against ancient, levigated stone.

 

He dies with a whimper as they plunge twin blades through his throat.

 

***

 

It reminds her of Firelink, of the first place she called anything akin to a home. Time-worn stones, cyclically arranged, and a lingering warmth to it. Caved-in living quarters – modest, but hospitable. Fragments of an old hearth.

 

A tiny banner lies buried within a pile of broken pieces of the foundation, down one of the old tunnels, caved-in catacombs winding their way to a tiny outcropping above a sheer precipice.

 

_No way forward from here._ She staggers back over to Anri, still clinging to the hilt of her sword like a walking stick as the embers of the estus wind their way about her still-healing limbs. The edges of the masses of scar tissue _ache_ , bone-deep, as they slowly unfurl into muscle, into flesh. She may not have died, but she doubts the estus will heal this fully. She suspects she will bear a scar as a death-mark from it all the same – the wounds were grave enough.

 

Anri clutches the fabric in bared hands, her gauntlets resting by her side on the dusty ground. Her face is awry, frowning in uneasy concentration, smeared with ash and flecks of dried blood, as she stares at the shimmering ink beneath her.

 

A small piece of the flower from the kiln clings still to her braid, even though the rest has long been crushed.

 

_It’s the darksign._

She stumbles over to peer at the blackened scrap. Anri speaks the truth – the deep orange embroidery evokes the flame the scars of the undead do, particularly given the soft glimmer the thread still bears while exposed to light, even after buried for so long in the darkness.

 

_Think’st thou it might be enchanted?_

_The design reminds me of some patterns Orbeck once pointed out to me from Oolacile, when I brought him scrolls thence. But I agree, it shines rather brightly._

Anri passes it over, picking her gauntlets back up. _Shall we hold it up to the light, then, for a better glimpse?_

 

They lift the small scrap up to the sunlight peering through the cavern’s far opening. The embroidery is translucent in the sunlight, glowing with the deep orange of a dull ember.

 

Anri hums, tilting the fabric to better catch the light. _I wonder how such a thing came to lie buried here._

But they have little time to muse on such matters, or to linger in the comfort of supporting each other, her body resting against Anri’s shoulder, as the warm silence is broken by the beating of wings, a high-pitched screeching, and the two of them are plucked from their perch by bat-winged creatures and dragged off towards the horizon.

 

In the distance, the sunrise – or sunset – coalesces into a detailed, glittering horizon of brass and stone.

 

A perfect, unbroken ring.

 

***

 

The heavy doors do not budge as they press upon them, but a gentle voice rings out from behind, muffled by the wood.

 

_Speak thee the name of God._

She opens her mouth as if to answer, and then pauses, turning to Anri. What answer can they even give, in this deranged city of Gwyn’s, as figureheads of Velka?

 

The woman must interpret their hesitation for what it is, or else dismiss them as mad hollows altogether, stumbling in blindly, for she adds with impatience: _Thine **own** god, if thou canst recall-_

_-The Darkmoon,_ Anri interrupts. _Dark Sun Gwyndolin. We serve as his blades, in his absence, under his company captain. We have avenged him of his murder at the hands of the Saint of the Deep, and we serve his sisters still._

We first made love in his city, she doesn’t say. Our fates were bound together irrevocably in his chapel – we defiled it with our ignorance, and we have spent the rest of our lives trying to atone for it.

 

_Ahh, then thou’st not forgotten, and perhaps ‘tis too then why we may converse. I am known as Shira, servant to the Princess Filianore, matriarch of the church, and sister to the Darkmoon. Though you speak heresies before me, even so, in this city of Gwyn, in addressing his child thus._

_Would thou not value the oath of duty thou swore’st to thy lady above all else, Knight of Fillianore, even above the word of her father, should they contradict?_

_They do not contradict, for the Princess serves her father in all things._

_The Darkmoon served Lord Gwyn faithfully even past his death, paid him every honor, though Lord Gwyn saw it fit to strike all imagery of him from the city before leaving him behind to guard ‘t. Is that not dutiful service?_

_And yet you speak more heresies._

_Thy isolation’s kept thee from news of the world around, and whatever illusion keeps the twilight of thy city thus has staved off the darkness._

_No. All those ken to God’s name are ken to terrors of the dark. We fight the Abyss here too._

There’s a beat. Anri inhales deeply. _I apologize._

Shira's voice softens slightly, the pointedness melting away just a touch. Please, _the apology is mine. Thou’ve a kind heart to speak to a captive such as I._

_A captive?_

_I am the duke’s daughter. I am here out of earnest duty, but my freedom is limited by my position. Thy l- thy lord is dead, thou claim’st?_

_He is. Half consumed by a fiend of the Abyss, the Maneater of the deep, who turned to the remaining gods. She –_ Anri tilts her head towards her companion before realizing the voice behind the door – Shira – cannot see her motion. _She- that is, my fellow soul here, put a blade through him, and laid the Darkmoon to rest._

_I could not have done ‘t without Anri._

There as a pause, before Shira responds with a quiet pensiveness. _So, you fight the darkness and serve the gods. May I ask thee a kindness?_

_You may._

_Perhaps you’ve beheld the lone dragon that inhabiteth this city? Midir is his name, and the Archdragons are his forebears. He once railed against the dark, but was by dark afflicted. Now here, returned, he remaineth to watch over the sleeping Princess, true to the old accord._

They’d caught a passing glimpse of dark scales on their way in, but not much more than that. She looks to Anri, who fiddles with a small piece of wolf insignia on her armor.

_…and yet, I would have thee put the dragon to rest. Afore the dark consumeth him, and his vows are forgot._

She meets Anri’s gaze, searching for a reaction. Anri gives a tentative nod, and so she gives voice to the thoughts coursing through the both of their minds.

 

_We are sworn enemies of the Abyss, Shira, for many reasons – some the gods’ and some our own. We shall seek thy dragon out, and do what we can for him, and for thee._

_Just afore the church of the Princess standeth a tower, honouring ancient knights. There lieth a small shrine, behind the sculpted knight which beareth no arms. Tis from there one may descend the chasm of darkness where Midir now makes his home. I have asked a thing most terrible of thee, but nonetheless, I must bestow upon thee my utmost thanks, for he was a dear friend and dutiful servant. Please, I beg of thee – hasten on thy journey._

_Of course._ The Ashen One pulls away for but a moment, the glimmering streets beckoning ahead, but a thought crosses her mind, for they know nothing of this place.

 

Anri, after all, was raised in Astora, where the faith in the Way of White was far less forgiving of involuntary heresies, and while Anor Londo was long abandoned, this remains still a city of Gwyn. Shira's quick frustration alone was evidence of that.

 

_I would ask of thee, should we encounter other followers of thy Princess, or her places of worship, are there rites we should follow out of respect? She is not recognized within Lothric, or Lordran, in our age._

_I am unsurprised she is not spoken of. It would only encourage others to seek this place out. But it is kind of you to ask. Only this – disturb not the slumbering princess, for as the fire waneth, does she lie by the dark, all for the sake of Man._

_***_

_Shira?_

_For what purpose have you returned to me? Do you not have business within the city, with Midir, and for your Darkmoon?_

_Indeed we do, but we’ve a question, and thou’rt the only unhollow soul native to this place we’ve encountered thus far. It concerns loyalties within the city._

_How strange. ‘Tis a city of Gwyn – all those within’t serve God – either directly or through the Princess – or else the Abyss. Their loyalties are not fairly difficult to divine._

_Indeed, but for the knights who wander near this place – their armor bears the darksign. Who do they serve?_

_They served God; though, not leaving my post, I cannot ascertain whether they still serve faithfully. Perhaps some have lost themselves to the curse of men._

_Why would they wear the darksign upon their plate, knowing what it stands for?_

_Knights of the Darkmoon, enlighten me. What does the seal stand for? What do you know?_

_It’s the brand of the undead curse._

_The armor of early men was forged in the Abyss. For this reason, the gods cast a seal of fire upon such armor, and those who possessed them._

_***_

They leave Shira and her solid wooden doors behind, taking shelter from the chaos of the city streets in a small building along an alleyway.

 

Their temporary reprieve rings hollow in the burden of the armor she’d salvaged from the knight they’d just fought, cold titanite heavy in her arms until she places it on the flagstone, but she cannot shrug off the weight of Shira’s words.

 

Nor can they draw their eyes from the crest, the blazing ring – the darksign – still burning bright, even without the embers of its bearer to fuel it, emblazoned on the chest-piece.

 

She speaks first, if only to lighten the mood. _I’m not wearing this._

_Gods, no. I shudder to think what it’d do to thee. No, we should bring this to Orbeck, if we return. Perhaps Liliane and Yuria, if we want to chance it – they’d be fascinated with its implications._

_Karla may also have some insight. She spoke of the Abyss as one with an education in the matter._

_And she’s a pyromancer besides._

_Shira claimed this was placed as a seal upon abyssal armor._

_Indeed._

The Ashen One runs her fingers gingerly over the mark. It is blisteringly hot, even for one so acclimated to flame. She wonders what it was like to wear, seal seated above one’s own darksign, burning into old scars.

 

Or else-

 

Her other gauntlet comes to her chest-plate, between her breasts, where her own darksign once remained before the first flame burnt it away.

 

Upon such armor and the humans who wore them, Shira claimed. Just above where the darksign sat, sealing their souls away, to be chipped away at slowly death by death.

_Do you not feel it could be more?_

Anri nods, grimly. _Ours are gone, are they not? Usurping the flame rebirthed me without mine, burned thine away._

_Our souls are unsealed. It’s why we can’t hollow._

_A literal seal upon man. And the Ringed City has guarded the truth of it since the first age of fire. No wonder Gwyn flooded the cities of man. Wait-_

_What is it?_

_One of the knights spoke to me of Oolacile, succumbing to the Abyss, how ‘twas flooded by Gwyn after Artorias sealed it just as New Londo was. But the banner we found in the dreg heap-_

_-was of Oolacile design. Dost thou think-_

_-they knew? Perhaps they discovered the city, learned what they did from someone within. It’s said the Father of the Abyss was a pygmy corpse, after all. Maybe they took something they shouldn’t have._

_Anri, wait._

_Yes?_

_The city itself – it’s a ring, is it not?_

_Well, yes, that’s how the name works._

_Is it not also a seal for something?_

There’s a brief moment, and then Anri rests her forehead against the edge of her hand, expression pinched in frustration. _And Gael has gone in search of what’s trapped within the center. Which just so happens to be the Dark Soul of man._

_My thoughts exactly._

_Fuck. Well, we either have to help or stop him, and we might as well figure it out on the way, I suppose._

_Suppose’st thou it’s what Shira’s goddess guards?_

_Undoubtedly. Well, we might as well start with the dragon. At least that’s uncomplicated._

They gather their things, tucking the pieces of armor – still illuminating the small room with an eerie glow – away into their various packs. Just as they move to set out, she turns to Anri and stops her, tucking a stray piece of hair behind her cheek and back into her braid. Anri’s expression softens at the gesture, and she takes the opportunity to gently press her forehead to Anri’s for a moment, before asking a question she’s had on her mind since the conversation with Shira.

_Dost thou wish to be a Darkmoon Blade, then, in earnest, when all’s said and done?_

_I thought it was. All said and done._

_‘Twas a question in earnest._

_I’m not certain. But I do know this – out of all the gods, theirs was a sentiment I could most get behind._

_***_

 

The strange pale mask covering the face of the creature before her is bug-like, though there is something human in’t. It stares at her, eyes wide, sallow, and unblinking as it speaks from its perch above the bog, head resting at a curious tilt upon its gnarled staff.

 

But it hasn’t hurled obscenities at them yet, or cast hexes, or thrown stones, or summoned ceaseless hordes of spirits, so she’s willing to hear it out.

 

_Many of us are by the fire forsaken. I speak of thy kind, and mine. Behold this city!_

_Yes, it’s very nice._ The swamp bubbles, the thick sludge eerily reminiscent of the human dregs that flooded Anor Londo’s cathedral – Aldrich’s vile refuse, and bile rises in her throat, even as the city’s glowing towers stand firm behind her. She fears what they’ll find concealed further within the center of it.

 

The tiny locusts sing onward, humming in synchrony with their man-faced preacher. _We are kindred, belike two eyes which gaze upon the other._

 

Countless eyes, staring at her from each bubble. It’s like she can’t look away, meeting every one of them, countless eyes inside herself staring back, into the Abyss, the dregs, the swamp.

 

Wisps of humanity, churning endlessly.

 

The preacher’s slitted eyes meet the two in her own face, uncomfortably soft, as he tilts her chin up.

 

_Fear not the dark, my friend._

_Thank you, but-_

A wide, bug-like grin curls across his mouth.

 

_And let the feast begin._

His words wrap around her, and she cannot stop his chanting no matter how overwhelming the words grow, for he knows just what to say, as the chirring of the locusts grows into a droning that drowns out all else-

 

And the stories spill out into memories – her own, her friends’, those of others she cannot recall ever knowing but nonetheless play out before her eyes and ears as if she walked them herself, conjured like an eerie dream from something resonating in his words, in her soul.

_One was a wayfaring knight, on an endless forbidden search. Only the Abyss granted closure, if not reunion with their beloved._

A small shadow of a woman, kneeling amidst a coliseum in bloodied armor, screaming and weeping amidst pools of sloughed-off skin as she clings to the remnants of the flickering, tired soul of a wolf. 

 

A knight, traipsing through a desolate prison, peering through cell bars, catching a glimpse – _finally, it’s her –_

-but it’s not, the lump curled in the corner merely resembles the woman he seeks, staring at him with his own cold dark eyes, tainted with the same darkness of failure, and he will not stand for it. He meets the dark edge at his daughter’s hands, and it is only then that he knows that he will be joining the one he seeks, for he will never find her here.

 

_She wanders herself, through Anor Londo, searching every crevice of the city for her friend before she loses her to the curse climbing through her own veins, but all she finds is a bed of feathers and perpetual agony and a terrible terrible choice. She cannot forsake her thus._

_They are reunited in blood and darkness, they trudge through abyss and plunge the world into a new age, but there is no closure in’t._

The wispy voice hums as the swamp continues to bubble, and she shudders as she catches sight of her own eyes staring back at her amongst the darkness. _One met the dark with learning. But in the end, learned his knowledge was wanting. The world began without knowledge, and without knowledge it will end. Dost not this ring clear and true?_

A man crouches over countless experiments, enchanted to the point of obsession, intent on shattering the yoke of fate. But, as he discovers, his flesh burning away from him, shackles torn off, now _soulless_ , but still him, still seeking, insatiably, there is no path beyond the scope of light, beyond the reach of dark.

 

A thief scuttles over rooftops and across balconies, ducking and weaving to hide from the creatures that guard the palace walls from prying eyes and sticky fingers. He knows the path, there’s a slab of titanite, the Ashen One will love it, there’s a slab of titanite-

-three winged knights descend upon him, swinging halberds at speeds he cannot fathom for their size, but nobody will ever know why he bothered looting like a man with a deathwish when the world had gone to shit.

 

He cannot stomach their blood, and yet, he cannot survive without some purpose, so he turns to books, to scrolls, to sorceries. But the more he learns, the more he wonders – where did Oolacile learn this? What comes after Fire? What are the stars? We have never known anything, and we will never understand what is out there, but he cannot help but endlessly _yearn_ for some cosmic understanding, a purpose within the world to the point that he fears it shall kill him if he cannot find one, though he knows he can no longer hollow. Grant me eyes, he screams to the stars, so that I may see you in your orbits.

She does not want to know these things. She does not want to think of Greirat’s ashes on the rooftops, of the hard lines of Orbeck’s face sallow and twisted by hollowing.

 

_One poor girl slew her own kin, but even so, was embraced, enveloped by the Abyss. Twas a comfort that neither moon nor sunless sky afforded her before._

The Darkmoon Blade slips behind the statue to find a chamber defiled. She kneels amongst bloodstained feathers, sifting in vain amongst the gore for anything – an explanation, some understanding – and finds naught but discarded flowers and bloody silk and the imprint of a stolen corpse. She cleans the chamber, wipes away the blood and the vomit and the feathers. She leaves the Irithyll snowdrops, bloodstained as they are, as an offering upon the altar.

 

The knight of the Sunless Realms seeks after her god but finds the scene too late to be of service in avenging him – the Maneater is slain, though his rot still lingers. The remnants of her deity, half devoured, lie amidst the muck, finally at peace, but their yet-unclosed eyes are glazed over in bitter agony, and she shudders, for she does not know how to bury a god.

 

She finishes her contracts, cutting the ears from the guilty. All but one, and so the woman who has never seen the sun meets the man who’s lost his in a pit heaped with mounds of corpses, just as she’s promised.

 

It feels like a sin, and as she kneels in the soft dirt of the untended graves, blade to her own ear, grandfather’s shield resting at a stone she’s marked for herself, it almost doesn’t matter anymore.

 

There’s no moon left to hunt her.

_And so, she lived in fear. Of the dark, of the things that gnawed at her flesh. And yet! The Abyss hath yet to produce any such creature!_

There are rats in the cell, biting at her feet, as the buzzing once more pricks at the exposed skin at the back of her neck. It is dark, it has always been dark, ever since they blinded her for the rites, ever since she blanched and felt cold.

Carim was no place for a faithless priestess. She could never see the fire, and the depths of the darkness growing stronger as it nipped and bit away at her soul terrified her. All she could ever see was what was put in her hands. Maybe if they let her burn those she’d finally feel warm.

 

The Firekeeper stands above the shrine, reeling at newfound vision, of the itch of old scars and unaccustomed sensation, as she studies her face in a stagnant pool of water. The darkness these gifted eyes once saw disturbs her soul – her very sense of purpose – but she shudders to think of what the novelty of the future holds.

For Ages of Dark have come and gone, but the spark of flame has always remained. But now, without it, all she can see ahead is nightmarish uncertainty, like a grand lake of mud, hidden now from sight.

_And so, despite his weighty armor, he too lived in fear. Of a delicate thing, little more than a girl. Where fire resideth, shadows twist and shrivel. But in the Abyss, there are shadows none._

He can feel her sightless eyes boring holes in him through the darkness, through the too-empty space between the iron bars and into the pale light of day. Her empty stare cuts through thick steel, overpowering the weak sun of the Undead Settlement.

 

He will not return her gaze. She does not even know she stares at him.

 

He will sit, as promised, captor and guardian, until she asks him otherwise, keeping her from the darkness. Keeping her from the fire, from the fate of his sister, the shadows of her sightless eyes, her scarred wrists and fingers. Her severed tongue.

 

But he is a knight, so he is duty-bound to fulfill his oath. But as a man, he cannot bear to fulfill either promise, and so he will not speak to her again.

 

So he will remain on this stone until he finally dies, two tiny shadows gnawing their way through his flesh and into his soul.

 

The woman kept her tongue. He does not know why she was permitted such a kindness, if such a kindness it could be, for she was not spared the remainder of the fate of her kin in Carim.

 

Her stare is full of accusations that her tongue does not speak, borrowed eyes of a heretic boring holes in his soul. He wonders what she sees in there – old moaning ghosts, a closely cradled softness, irreconcilable years of hatred: he cares not. He simply cannot bear to meet her gaze.

 

For he understands all at once why firekeepers are not permitted eyes.

 

Men would have to take accountability for some of those sins they attributed to the gods, if they did.

_Who among you would feast already?_

Hawkwood guts her atop the bodies of countless Abyss Watchers in the mausoleum, tearing a stone hungrily from her pack as she bleeds out around his greatsword onto the corpses of his former comrades. Horace guts her in a murky lake, unrecognizing, unthinking, but scared of things that moved suddenly in the dark.

 

In another life, she clutches Anri’s straight sword unsteadily as the love of her life lunges at her with a broken dagger and blank eyes by the outskirts of the cathedral.

 

A choked sob escapes the woman to her left, and she watches herself, stride forward and gut Horace at the halfway fortress with her old halberd even as Anri’s still offering to aid her on her journey. She watches Anri crumple in the grass, sobbing. _Don’t leave me, not you…. Not like the others. Oh Horace… Horace, why…_

_Horace, everyone, forgive me…. I was weak on my own._

 

In the dark, she can just see a flicker of a form, a knight in red, hunched over a piece of twitching meat.

_Search thine own self. Fear not the dark, my friend. And let the feast begin._

 

The swamp locusts chirr in anticipation, in applause, in acclamation.

 

She shakes her head weakly. _There will be no feast._

 

_Do not fear it, usurper._

 

Anri gags, leading her by the shoulders away from the preacher and up the nearby steps towards a small building with uncomfortable haste.

 

_Fear not the dark, my friend._

 

Anri snorts, but she won’t make eye contact.

 

_Ignore them. They’re just trying to get thee to let them eat thy corpse. I swear, can we go but five minutes without encountering some mad cannibal fantasy?_

She jests, but her tone rings hollow. For all Anri’s seeming protests, she’s just as shaken.

 

She doesn’t blame Anri for it, either. They’ve seen some strange things in their travels – newly organized religions and vestiges of dying cults alike – but nothing like this. Insectoid preachers, worshipping…. Worshipping what, exactly? The Abyss? The age of dark?

 

The bubbling dregs of the swamp rise in her mind’s eye, an endless ocean of humanity churning, countless eyes staring back at her from within a sea of cosmic memories full of fear and horror and accusation alike.

 

But what feast?

 

She stops as they enter the room, choking out a half syllable. She needs to know what Anri heard, what Anri saw, for their souls are tethered, and if so-

 

-if so, she must apologize.

 

_I-_

_Thou’rt…. No, I must speak. I’ve a fear, Ashen One, that’s been pricking away at me since the Dreg Heap, and those monsters have only compounded matters._

Oh. Oh, of course. Maneating priests. _The swamp reminds you of him._

Anri’s face is a mask of horror as she nods, then shakes her head, biting her lip, eyes watering, before fixing her face on a point on the ceiling. The words come in a cracked plea.

 

_What if he was right?_

_He wasn’t._

_No. Please. Listen. What if he was, and by following her- Yuria, I mean, that is, I just- what if we brought about that which he wished for?_

She flushes, shaking her head, and moves to place a hand on Anri’s shoulder – to provide reassurance, if nothing else. _I-_

Anri brushes it off. _This isn’t about thee or thy guilt! I need thee to seriously consider this possibility, because between the swamp of bubbling human dregs or the piles of ashes or the dawn of a new fucking age or the cannibals at world’s end, it’s looking like we-_

Her voice cracks, and she inhales deeply, sitting on the cold stone to break away from the pressure of maintaining eye contact, staring down the hall, away from the muck staining their armor.

_…it just. It seems as if we’ve done his work for him._ Anri shakes her head, exhausted. She’s been carrying the burden of this monster for too many years, and the strain of the mark he’s left on her life is practically visible, for she’s carrying tension in her shoulders again where there wasn’t but several moments before they ventured down the street towards the swamp. _Go feel guilty somewhere else, please, if thou won’t be helpful._

She slumps down across from Anri. She can just see the sky outside the window, the dull orange glow of the city’s edges, the false sunset.

_He wasn’t right, Anri. Nothing he did was right. He could have been the most gifted fucking prophet, for all I care, but what he chose to do with whatever he thought he foresaw invalidates any claim he has upon the future of the world._

_Fat lot of good that does us, living in his paradise._

_Doesn’t do him a whole lot of good either, seeing as he’s dead._

_I’d find that more reassuring if he wouldn’t feel immensely validated in the knowledge that he was correct._

_Me too._

_I guess we can’t burn this whole city to the ground._

_Did thou truly believe what thou said? That we did his work for him?_

_Looking at this place, I can’t help but feel thus._

_Even if the alternative was more of the same, but worse?_

_Can’t exactly fault thee, since I wasn’t exactly alive at the time._

_***_

_Thou’rt a better woman than I._

_Oh, leave off ‘t. I’ve no patience for self-flagellation today._

_Thou’d have given me thy blade, if thou…. If thou knew._

_I’d planned to leave it for thee at the shrine, actually, with Ludleth, and instructions not to follow. I figured at the rate things were headed I’d be not long for this world once Aldrich was dead._

_So that nearly did happen, then._

_And what of thee? Would thou’ve struck us down by the fireside? No. That bug was full of shit._

_If I was hollow, I might've._

_And besides, none of this means anything besides confirming that which we already knew-_

Anri gives her a look, eyes glassy and hard, and it cuts her deep to her core, because she’s seen that look before.

 

Like a fire, burning dangerously low.

 

_-Of the two of us, thou’ve a stronger will._

 

***

 

They’ve little time to argue the matter, for Lapp comes bursting into their conversation with all the subtlety of a loosed warhound, incapable of reading the awkwardness in the room. He moves his arms animatedly as he speaks, excitedly asking what they’ve seen, whether they have any leads for him, slapping them on the back as he cheers the fact that they’re all standing here together.

 

The only blessed aspect of his intrusion is that he’s brought _alcohol,_ and gods knows they could use a drink.

 

_To my search, and to your duty. And,_ he gestures to the both of them with his mug, _to the joy that lies before us!_

 

Anri pinches the bridge of her nose between her fingertips. Telepathically, she hears a familiar voice. _Okay, I know we were arguing not a moment before, and it was not over something trivial, but this man is infuriating._  

 

She downs the Siegbrau. _I’ve never seen someone so unconcerned about hollowing._

Lapp, meanwhile, is drinking his through the ill-fitting slit in his helmet, which quite frankly _should_ be where his eyes are. She does not want to think about how he’s doing that.

 

_Now, I’m back off in search of the Purging Monument. You know, once I find it, everything will come back to me. Who I was, what I lived for, what my name was, and…_

He turns towards her, eyeless helm slightly damp from the vestiges of Siegbrau around the edges of the single slit.

 

… _what terrible grudges I had._

She tilts her head. Anri raises her eyebrows and inhales deeply, taking another drink.

 

Chipper as ever, Lapp suddenly shrugs. _Oh, I dunno! I just have this feeling. That that’s the kind of man I was. Anyway, I’m rather running in circles, I’m afraid. And I’ve searched high and low._

_I almost wonder if it was even here in the first place._

***

 

They discover, several wrong turns later, that Lapp’s monument most certainly was here.

 

Could only ever _be_ here.

 

_Pay the price,_ a voice burbles out, beneath the oozing welts of rot. _And purge thy sin. ‘Twill be done._

This – this site is overwhelming, amongst the rot in the swamp, in the city’s hallowed, hollowing halls. At the end of the universe, how can there lie only _more_ _rotting ichor?_

 

And yet it reminds her, because of course it does, looking like that, a beacon of sludge rising above her amidst another of Gwyn’s foul cities, of her own transgressions, and her hand itches for the unwieldy, unbalanced blade it once shot to of its own accord-

 

-A gentle hand on her shoulder stops her, as Anri stares the monument down with grave expression _. It doesn’t work like that._

_I can purge any of thy sins. Restore thy memories too, if thou desire’st._

_Can’st thou revert time, then? What of the consequences of those actions, for the sins thou claim’st to purge? Do they simply vanish? Or do they cease to be of import to thee, thy watchdogs, and those fool enough to pay thy toll?_

In that moment, she remembers her first conversation with Anri, and it’s no surprise at all how easily she fell in with the Blades, because she’s always been a stalwart defender of those sinned against. Transactional justice is an affront to everything she’s stood for.

 

She was a Blue Sentinel before she was anything else.

 

As they leave the eerie, burbling thing behind them, they are left with but one question:

 

_Should we tell Lapp, knowing what it is, Anri?_

_That thing is abhorrent, but… I feel as if he’ll hollow completely if we don’t. Besides, he has the right to make that choice himself, I suppose. If we deny him that, we deny him his personhood._

_He seems a decent enough fellow, piss-poor timing aside._

_Yes, but I wonder – what else is it that he’s forgotten, besides his name?_

 

They give him directions. Lapp sets off happily, clanking his way up the ladder, and they’re left with a chill in the hollow streets of the Ringed City.

 

***

 

They make it just past the bridge before the uneasy rhythm breaks, and she can no longer bear the awkward silence.

 

_We should speak, Anri, about the preacher._

_We should, yes. At some point, certainly. Though I know not what to say on the subject._

_I apologize – I was shaken by his capacity to draw up memories. It felt-_

_-intrusive, didn’t it?_

_It brought up old wounds that I’d thought closed, and ones I’d never let myself feel._

Like Sirris. She’d found the marked gravestone, certain, but had no idea. She’d assumed the Shrine Handmaiden… that her grandmother had found and buried her.

 

Or perhaps she’d known, or else suspected, but hadn’t wanted to consider the possibility.

 

_Something feels wrong with me, has felt wrong since Anor Londo. Like there’s a piece of me that’s meant to hollow but can’t quite do it._

_Okay, think on what thou spoke, because that’s what upsets me. Because if that’s how this place makes thee feel…_ Anri’s eyes are distant, staring off in the direction of the locusts chirring in the swamp below the cliffs.

… _then how do you think it makes **me** feel, knowing I’ve already proven the more corruptible, the weaker-willed of the pair?_

_Wait._ She tilts her head, blinking back surprise. _Thou fear thy corruption at the hands of this place?_

_I worry about many things. I fear we’ve set the world on Aldrich’s course. I’m scared I’m going to lose thee somehow too, and I’ll be alone again. And I’m terrified this place will make monsters of the pair of us, but above all, I fear my lack of conviction will find new ways to make itself known as a weakness._

_Thou can hollow no longer._

_Tell that to a lifetime of terror._

_Anri, I will not let thee fall victim to something like that._

_And what of thee?_

_What of me?_

_I promised thee, back in Londor. I made a vow that I intend to stand by, that I pray to whatever gods still listen and some of the dead ones that thou never force me to act on, that if something evil should try and co-opt thee I would strike thee down. But we both know-_

She thinks on hollow hands and a halberd in Horace’s gut. Soft iron against the neck of Anri’s still-sobbing form, blade dropped the second he went limp.

 

_-we both know I may not have the strength._

Head shaking, she grabs Anri’s gauntlet in her own. _No, I swear it. As long as I breathe, you will not lose your path._

_Nor as long as I, you yours, I swear by my soul._

_No, swear not by thy soul. Swear on something else._

_Blood, then. By my blood, and by thine, neither will you._

 

_***_

Their first clue that the man they find in the crumbling tower is no longer merely Lapp is his improved sense of timing.

 

Well, that’s selling him short. He’s more attentive, like he’s looking them over in that ill-fitting armor of his for the first time, giving them the time and the space to speak for themselves before quietly offering them his thanks.

 

The second clue is that he’s waited for them in an ancient, crumbling tower.

 

She should have seen it coming.

 

There’s a boot to her back in an instant, and her knees hit the dirt, armor shielding her from the worst of the jagged rocks at the bottom. Anri comes tumbling down almost immediately after, landing partially atop her torso.

 

_Every age, it seems, is tainted by the greed of men. Rubbish, to one such as I – devoid of all worldly wants!_

She stares up at the familiar crooked nose of a crooked man, unhelmed at last. _What’s thy quarrel, Patches?_

_Well, I suppose it’s as I told you. I’m just the kind of man to keep grudges._

Patches gives her a dark look, all mirth drained from his eyes. _And you got my friend killed._  

 

Anri wipes her face on the crook of her elbow, just between the vambraces, smearing her gambeson and jaw both with dust and crumbling dirt. _I don’t fault thee thy grudge, but Greirat made his own choices. Killing us won’t bring him back._

She forces her gaze away from Anri’s jawline, her blood running all too uncomfortably cold in but a moment. Patches, for the time being, is easier to contemplate. _You’ve borne a grudge against me since we met in Firelink._

 

He had, after all. She first saw him through locked iron bars, a jammed door, a harshly spat warning that curiosity would kill her, some places are better left alone. He cost her one death, she never understood why he did it.

 

(She knows now – if she had seen him coming, she surely would have foreseen Yuria)

 

But the first word out of his mouth was ‘ _Sorry.’_

Maybe that was why she forgave him when he begged on his knees like a fool for her forgiveness.

Patches grins. _Hmm… I dunno. Maybe it’s just the way we are. Well, at the very least, I’ll stick you in my prayers._

_That’s meaningless, for I know thy prayers are directed at no god and nonexistent besides._

_Ah, so you do have a brain in your head._

_I’m tired, Patches. I wish not for more bloodshed. Thou’rt one of two who didn’t immediately try and kill me upon beginning to hollow or hollowing. Consider my naivety in Firelink that thus offends thee repaid with thine here._

 

Patches’ thinks for a moment, and gives a slight nod, gesturing to the other side of the crumbling tower. She can just make out a tunnel amidst the dusty rock beyond.

_A fine Dark Soul, to you, then._

 

***

 

Her hand hovers over a fading illusion over a statue of an unarmed soldier.

 

Anri hovers over her shoulder, watching their backs for shadows in the dark. _Why is the path hidden here, of all places?_

 

Faceless silver knights, positioned nearby an extravagant depiction of Gwyn. Hidden pathways behind well-concealed illusions.

 

Too reminiscent of a chapel devoted to a different god.

 

This one, adorned with statues of primordial serpents, is tucked away like a dirty afterthought.

 

The trappings of worship, the pews, the altar – all are dusty and long forsaken.

 

_They didn’t even bother to take out their dead._ Anri nudges a corpse with the flat of her blade, which lies curled up, kneeling with its forehead against the altar in antiquated garb, rotting and stained.

 

She brushes the dust off the altar and the corpse’s hand, which clutches a small strip of embellished golden cloth between its violet wrappings.

 

_A favor? Mayhaps of Gwyn. Perhaps the princess. What thinkest thou?_

She looks over the figure’s missionary garb, its faded gold embroidery, unsuited for battle.

 

_I think this person never intended to pick up a sword._

Anri turns over a palm to inspect the tightly bound wrappings. _I think they came to embrace one well enough. These are not bound in the style of one who does not wield a weapon._

 

_Where is their blade, then, Anri?_

The corpse’s head rests at the altar of the neglected shrine, and the tunnel in the wall behind descends into darkness, and she turns to stare down, down, _down_ into a lake below so she does not have to think about disarmed corpses and dark chapels.

 

Anri sidles up to her, still clutching the wrappings in hand, and tosses a small glittering pebble through the opening. The ripples are barely visible from where they stand –  the waters cannot be more than a couple feet deep at most.

 

They breathe quietly in tandem, waiting for something, anything. A sign of movement, a shape beneath, even a sound of acknowledgement.

 

The dragon – if it even makes its lair trapped beneath this place, for they’ve seen it not – either does not deign a pebble worthy of his attention or is too far gone to notice.

 

She sincerely hopes it’s the former.

 

The silence is unnerving, and she cannot shake the similarities between the circumstances of their entry into this shrine of Gwyn’s and what she did to Anri in the Darkmoon’s, for they feel too closely drawn – that body felt too deliberately placed thus – to be coincidental.

 

It feels like an offer. A better kind of penance, but worse all the same, because she cannot shy away from the sin of it all. To perform an echo of the task – mercy-kill again, but this time a creature that can fight back, can look her in the eye and strike her down with wrath on par with the divine –  and to be forced to relive every second of the agony of the first in its similarity.

Anri coughs. The water below is still silent, motionless. _Am I also to be the one who says it?_

The previous train of thought lost, she turns back towards the woman at her side. _Says what?_

_Gwyn’s struggle against the fading of the flame has always amused me greatly in its hypocrisy, growing up in Astora as it was, but never moreso in its inept nature than now. I mean, really, raising a dragon to eat the Abyss? What did he think was going to happen?_

_Dragons lived not in the time of the Abyss, and it was thought to be a purely human corruption at first. I suppose there’s some logic in pitting one seemingly immortal foe against another. Though clearly, thou’rt right – he should have seen this coming._

_I’m going to raise a dragon to consume the Abyss? How does that not seem like the most ill-contrived plan?_

_Hmph. ‘Consume the Abyss.’_

_Oh. Oh no. Please don’t suggest-_

_-no, that’s exactly where I’m going with this. Did we not encounter a group of priests preaching about feasting and darkness?_

_How does one even consume the Abyss?_

_I suppose one just eats the corrupted. Though, as thou said, you’d think that’d just compound the corruption over time._

_Still, much easier to do when one’s the size of a building._

 

***

 

Midir is larger than the King of Storms by even a good _factor of three_ , though that, she realizes, was but a Stormdrake, an ancient wyvern, not a true dragon at all, never mind a _descendant of the everlasting._ The creature before her is far more imposing than the thing that once nearly sent her running from the peaks – far bulkier, covered in thick scales at least the width of her palm at the smallest and crusted over with deep purple crystals, vestiges of his upbringing alongside the duke-

 

-or remnants of his abyssal meals, once devoured, now in turn devouring.

 

He lunges wildly, his claws tearing across the both of them as he rampages across the shallow lake in huge, raking strikes.

 

She ducks back just in time to grab Anri and pull her shield over the both of them as a gout of fire careens across the surface, tinged with razor-sharp crystals shards that shatter against their greaves.

 

Anri’s cheek is hot against her own, and she feels a gauntlet grip her shoulder tightly. For a split-second, beneath her, she turns to see her wife’s eyes flash her a look of relief, of gratitude, and her chest is tight, and she longs to linger here, to say something, but they know better than to surrender their focus, and force themselves apart once more, splashing through the water, ducking beneath the next sweeping blow of the tail.

 

With a focused breath, the beast draws the darkness from the water. A creeping darkness winds around his scaly limbs, tendrils of dark energy that block the reflection of light as they crawl across his crystal-coated hide, and then the whole thing explodes in a sudden burst.

 

They’re wounding him, surely, for he staggers slightly, his wings shedding a faint crystalline powder, remnants of torn scales or fractured essence, his movements growing all the more desperate as he snaps towards his prey. They can do this, the pair of them, now that they’re more practiced in joint combat.

 

For they’ve twice the bodies, and while one baits the beast, the other can move nimbly between his unwieldy limbs, dodging the blows, to strike at the snapping maw, or else a leg, a tail, a wing dipping too low.

 

She barrels into the side of his jaw as he descends, giving Anri the opening she needs to strike through as he lies dazed upon the water, and miraculously, it is over.

 

Midir’s body falls into the pool with a series of heavy splashes that echo through the crystal-laden cavern, the roars and screams of battle fading to the quiet panting of exhausted knights catching their breath.

 

She treads quietly through the bloody water to inspect the corpse as Anri cleans her blade.

 

_His wings are full of long-scarred holes._

_Thinkest thou they were cut? Or that the Abyss ate through them?_

_I am not certain. The beast certainly could climb, and fly just enough to harry us, but not enough to save his life. Nor to leave the city to which he was bound, or wreak havoc beyond its borders._

 

Anri turns back to the dead archdragon before her. _This felt not right. What we’ve fought – the warped things – we’ve seen such, to be certain, but they were oft of their own making, or that of cruel tyrants. But-_

And she tears a small spear-shaped ornament from where it lies embedded in the beast’s neck, a crest shaped like curled grass-

 

_-It seems the gods too are capable of cruelty on the scale of men._

 

She thinks to the dead missionary, splayed upon the altar, clutching the same symbol embroidered in gold silks. She thinks on the ringed knights, the darksign branded upon their flesh, the humanity sealed within their soul. She thinks upon the purging monument, the coagulation of writhing masses.

 

_This city is, beyond all others I’ve seen, a testament to Gwyn’s sins. So much so that I cannot help but wonder if Velka had another purpose in sending Gael hence._

***

 

_Foolishness. The king’s decree is no trifling matter._

A young man brandishes a birch bow aimed at her throat, for she entered first, and fires. With a wave of his hand, conjured spheres of soul energy – corrupted, somehow, for they glimmer with points unnatural – burst into tiny spear-tips that dart towards them like thrown daggers.

 

She yells back towards him as they shatter against her shield.

_We have no intent to disturb your goddess, Spear of the Church. We are simply in search of a man, an old slave knight._

_Indeed,_ Anri calls out, _we had no knowledge that this was a temple, let alone her resting place – we’ve even served her for Shira, laid the old dragon to rest for her. If you have not seen him here, then we will leave._

His garb is familiar, ragged yet restored – a soft white tunic with golden embroidery that glimmers in the dim light that penetrates the chamber’s tiny windows. A purple silk sash that matches the bindings on his wrists, wrapped tightly, so that he may hold his blade with newly-practiced comfort, avoid blistering-

 

A spirit of the judicators, like all the others they’d seen, warped and twisted from the corpses of those who’d died in this place into obedient service.

 

The man before them, though, seemed to serve willingly enough in life.

_You are out of time, out of place. Neither of you belong here. Your past favors are meaningless in light of your trespass and the weight of the sins you carry._

She ducks another series of soul spears. _Out of place, perhaps, but we are when we ought. We serve the gods by circumstance, but we do so willingly. And you too are out of time, for-_

_-for we found your corpse,_ Anri finishes.

The ghost before them scoffs. _You are heretics and trespassers, usurpers both. Unsealed and unshackled. There is no man beyond this hall, and when I am through with you, there will be no knight within it. I am Halflight, Spear of the Church, and I cannot ignore the threat you pose._

 

He speaks as he dodges Anri’s attempts to disarm him, flicking his wrist, pulling back his blade for a brief moment to reach for a small golden ornament, and finishes as both a cracking boom and a flurry of spears erupt from the stone floor of the atrium.

 

They shimmer in the air, glimmering and half-formed. Vestiges of ancient sorcery, phantoms conjured by a ghost. The blood the spears cut from the two of them simply passes through the illusion, spilling straight to the tile.

 

But though he is but a ghost, Halflight _bleeds_. He clutches at wounds on his side, flipping away from a sweep of her blade, and they leave a trace, smeared across the pillars he readies himself against.

 

They’d promised. They’d promised no disrespect, and yet their words cannot reach soulless ears, for he is as free to choose to listen as the other Judicator’s ghosts.

 

The specter of what was once Halflight steels himself as Anri runs and slides across the tile, deflecting the blow of her blade as it comes to strike deep with a riposte, and Anri’s shriek echoes across the walls, but the Ashen One cannot see _how_ deep, for her view is blocked by his unarmored back.

 

So she jams the accursed greatsword through his spine, only stopping when-

 

-the specter falls to his knees, like a corpse, like _his corpse,_ atop another corpse.

 

She lays the vanishing spirit to rest with a numb feeling in her hands and a twisted sense of fate in her soul, and cradles her corpse to the fire within her own heart.

 

***

 

Anri stirs in her arms after a time, wounds closing, body warming once more. _Ought we to even press forward, Ash?_

_Perhaps not. But if we do not, what was the purpose of all this, then? What meaning-_

 

She stares at the bloody stain on the tile, devoid of a body.

 

- _what meaning did the added death hold?_

_Freedom, for him,_ Anri says, in the gentle voice she’s thus reserved for speaking about fallen friends. _His spirit was as shackled as our souls were unbound. I feel more pity for the demons, to be quite honest. But I do nonetheless feel that there’s honest purpose to be found in unmasking the truth behind all these well-concealed lies, if only to prevent their continuance. The gods only know how many more of them this place hides behind illusions._

_That’s funny. That’s exactly what Vilhelm said would be our undoing._

_Yes, well, Vilhelm kept a girl shackled to a table, even if he lied and claimed it was for honorable purpose. But even so, do we not owe it to Gael to find him?_

They do. Either their aid they owe, for he’d done them no wrong, acting with seeming good intentions as he had, or, they owed it to the man they thought they knew to dissuade him from doing harm.

The tower doors are heavy with rust unseen, hinges groaning weakly, and the pair of them falter as the twin set grinds with an uncomfortable weight against the floor.

 

_That’s wrong._

Anri peers anxiously inside. _That’s loud, is what that was._

Light filters into the darkness, illuminating a surreal scene before them. A woman – no, a _god-child,_ ethereal, unworldly – lies reclined upon airy, white bedding, enrobed in ivory gossamer. Yet for all its beauty and presentation, the room is overwhelmed by overgrowth: roots and moss climbing over the legs of the couch, poking holes in the edges of the chiffon bedding, creeping up to the slumbering goddess, couching the room in a heavy smell of rot.

 

But though vines curl delicately by strands of her wispy, dark hair strewn across the bedclothes, and weeds poke through the stonework where her foot dangles precariously off the bed, the rotting vegetation gives the sleeping woman an uncanny berth.

 

Nothing, it seems, dares disturb the princess.

 

Her head rests delicately upon soft hands, cradling-

 

-A fractured egg. Dark crystals, like Midir’s breath, cluster within the inside like a broken geode, churning like the Abyss.

 

Anri flinches, and she can hear her wordless thoughts as if they were her own.

 

_They’re staring back at me._

 

Countless eyes stare back at her too from within the darkness, reflections amongst the fractured shards. Anri’s, perhaps, or else her own. Or something else entirely, something abyssal, something celestial, something primordial.

 

But the god-child’s eyes, her face resting upon her hands, are obscured by darkness. Twisting shadows curl around her eyes in all-too-familiar bands, like spider veins, consuming her eyelids and the upper portion of her cheeks.

 

Wordlessly, she extends the question to Anri’s soul: _Is that-_

_She cannot be. They must have… Is she blind? Did they cut out her eyes? Turn her into some twisted firekeeper? Was she the first?_

She thinks back to Anor Londo, to the defaced statues of the Firstborn, the warped statues of the Darkmoon, back to Irithyll and the unabashed statuary that decorated the new capital of the gods. There have been no mentions of this god-child outside of this city, not even a name, barely even one inside it, outside of those press-ganged or built for the purpose of guarding her, there is _nothing, did the Darkmoon even know she **existed?**_

_What did they do to her?_ Anri shudders, and steps forward. _What did Gwyn do to her?_

 

The slumbering Filianore glitters in golden embroidery. It reflects off of her gown like chains.

 

_Is she **human**?_

_Is that Midir’s egg?_

 

She reaches for it with a bloodied hand, to touch the crystal, just to see if the texture is the same as the jagged edges of his scales, but Anri quickly pulls her away by the shoulder – _we cannot._

A drop of blood falls from her fingertip, forced the other direction. It lands not upon the crumbling shell of the long-hatched egg, but instead upon the bared skin of the pale hands resting atop it.

 

A fingertip twitches. A second follows, sending dust and tiny shards of eggshell crumbling into the waiting lap below. One piece, another, and then the whole thing begins to come apart, collapsing in on itself into a pile of broken shell and pitch-colored dust. Both knights stare, frozen in place, as the head of the now-stirring god-child slowly curls inwards, lifting sleepily from its longtime, now-absent perch. Her hands, too, with nothing more to prop them up, gradually separate, revealing a faint distortion behind them – a hazy, once-concealed shimmer that makes her head ache and her eyes burn-

 

- _her eyes, can you see -_

 

-and then the woken Filianore presses the bloodstained hand to her chest, there’s an eruption of flame, of rapidly fading light, and the world goes dark.

 

***

 

She can still feel the gentle breeze in the chamber, still smell the heavy rot of the plants that wind and curl around the princess’ bed. But it is no longer a dimly lit bedchamber in a well-defended tower, at the height of Gwyn’s great Ringed City.

 

A hot desert sun filters in between heavy clouds and crumbling portions of broken walls. They stand in the shaded remains of a sand-swept ruin.

 

Curled in on itself, the thing that rests upon the bed is no longer a goddess but a shriveled, hollow corpse of one. What remains of Filianore grins in her gauzy wrappings, embroidered embellishments time-faded or simply shattered, gown torn, eyes-

 

- _burnt._

 

And upon her breast, where her gown has rotted away, for the smell within the room was never the plants, but the _hollowing god-child,_ they can see the edges of an old scar, puckered skin.

 

She bites back a sob, stepping forward again, gripping Anri’s hand tightly in her own bloodied one as she moves to peel the decaying fabric back from the festering skin, because they’ve already done this, they’ve _done this,_ and if they’ve done this, then she _has to know-_

 

Beneath the garment, shaking hands reveal a faded ring, burnt deep into the rotting flesh, cracked in one tiny spot near the top where a dark stain still lingers on the skin.

 

Anri drops her hand in shock, stepping back with an expression twisted in horrified anguish, _gods be damned, did he use her to do this-_

-she runs, boots hard against the sand-slippery tile, slamming against the rusty doors, for they _were_ rusty, she _knew_ , because she needs air, she cannot bear to look at this, until she is finally free to slip through into the city-

 

-but there is no city outside.

 

There is _nothing_ on the horizon.

 

Only a hot breeze, endless dunes of sand, a desolate desert, small crumbling pieces of buildings – no, there is something, a faint glimmer, far-off, perhaps Lothric, perhaps not, but-

 

She can feel Anri’s chest press against her back, arms wrap around her in a comforting show of welcoming affection, but one she’s not certain she can bear.

 

_She was- that is… the woman. They sealed us. The Lord of Light sealed us. He sealed our humanity, and he sealed the soul, and he sealed this city… Ash, were they not the same seal?_

She stares out into the desert. A single lump crawls, begging soft murmurs.

 

_This truly must be world’s end._

The lump drags itself by the elbows, sporting an old crown, towards them, towards the tower. It begs for Filianore, it begs for aid.

 

_She cannot aid you. We are all that’s left._

_The Red-hood is come to eat us._

Inhaling deeply, she tightens her fingers around Anri’s wrists, pulling her arms tighter around her torso.

_To eat our dark souls…._

 

He keels over in the dust, crumbling like the remnants of the hollow goddess he so desperately sought with his last moments. Anri, too, crumbles against her, pressing her forehead into the junction of her shoulder, breathing hard and angry.

 

Locusts chirr in the sand as the sun slowly dips beneath the horizon.

 

***

 

Behind them, a figure slinks slowly through the darkness, unsteady but unnoticed, but determined nonetheless. The trail she’d tracked, the bloodless smear of displaced sand, a dragging wake of a near corpse, had halted blessedly before the princess’ chambers, but it picked up in foot tracks.

 

She had nearly given up on miracles, after so long in the dark. After so long bound to it.

 

***

 

Two knights chat in soft voices amidst derelict ruins.

 

_I’ve searched for you, dark stricken-creatures._

 

A knight, shadowed by darkness, steps slowly into the light. Shira’s eyes have a feral glint to them, unhinged – not hollow, but something else entirely, an unholy glean of desperation, of fear, of mad reverence.

 

The eyes of a woman with nothing left to lose but the last shreds of herself.

 

For she has _failed._ She’s failed her predecessor, her father, and in doing so, she’s failed herself, for-

 

She pulls back her hands, lightning crackling in her fingertips, as an arrow takes shape.

_I may be Shira, daughter of the duke, trusted friend to Midir, but I am descendant of gods, crafted from Gwyn’s soul itself. At once, I am the honor of the gods, the glory of fire, and the fear of the dark._

 

-For she’s a being of light and there’s _no light left here, for the illusion of it is gone, and it’s entirely their fault._

 

_-She was but a prisoner._

 

_I should have known, from the scent of burning flame you bore, from your ceaseless questions. You serve not Gwyn, you do not serve his children, you do not serve my lady, the world is undone, unshackled, usurped, and it is **entirely** your fault._

The arrow fires, a great streak of lightning bursting forth, aimed at the neck but catching Anri in the shoulder, burning through the edge of already rent armor to singe the skin as she jumps back, drawing her blade. The scent of ozone overpowers even that of scarred tissue, filling the room quickly as Shira screams at them.

_Try again, to remember the great honor it was to be as a spear, and remember this, creatures: for thy treachery, thy profanity, and thy shameless yearning-_

_Ne’er will I forgive thy kind._

_You shall not go unpunished._

A second arrow strikes, quickly following the first, dissipating across the metal of the Ashen One’s chest plate in an uncomfortable burst, as she rushes towards Shira. Shira bellows – a low, piercing cry – and slams the remnants of her bygone cross spear into the cracked stones and sand that now serve as a battlefield.

 

The cross spear-

 

            - nay, the twitching, writhing _thing_ that lies upon it, _remnants of a corpse_ , she thought, _surely, not yet cleaned off ‘t,_ but no longer, for it _howls._

 

Darkness licks at her skin as the sound pierces her eardrums, because it’s Anri screaming, Horace screaming as she guts him, her own bitter cry as Vilhelm’s sword pierced her gut, and she can feel something die inside her all over again.

 

Shira grips the handle of her weapon, wielding it like a hammer, swinging it as the squirming body weakly flails with a maddening strength, as the two of them stagger.

 

_How can she-_

How can Shira bear it?

 

Her eyes are dead inside as she brings the burning crucifix down upon them, and the Ashen One wonders how such a creature of the light might be immune, or else unbothered, by such a darkness.

 

How long has she searched for them, desperately crawling these wastes for a sign of those who took everything from her?

 

(For she has fallen so far, mad herself, that such fear – even the burn of dark itself – no longer pains her, for the guilt, the burdens she carries weigh so heavy upon her fragmentary soul).

 

She has had centuries to prepare for this. She will not be taken by these false prophets.

 

But so has the lingering pygmy, and he will have his vengeance as well.

 

One slam pins her quarry to a crumbling wall, bashing her prisoner’s skull against the stonework. There is no roar. The mad priestess, in her folly, tries again, slamming harder, bone cracking against fractured stone.

 

The eyeless skull grins at her final vexation.

 

Behind her disarrayed bun, an unnoticed hex detonates.

 

***

 

The three of them lie smeared against the sand in an excruciating, bloody heap.

 

The sensation of agonizing _burning_ – of flesh and sinew knitting itself together of its own accord, a slow and searing rebirth from the unshackled flame that burns throughout their blood – is almost familiar now. It will never take the place of the formerly familiar sensation of warm glow of rebirth from embers, but in an uncanny way it is never far from her mind.

 

There is a desperate choking from the left, where Shira lies in a puddle of something that makes _her_ stomach turn, and she spent what must certainly be _days_ among the worst of the Lords of Cinder, and the poor knight is desperately trying to force out words even as she gags on blood.

 

_Never… would I ever…_

 

There is a brief retch, another frantic struggle for air.

 

  _… forgive thy lowly kind…_

 

She could not even turn her head to face them, in the end.

 

They remain there, staring at the sky, as they regenerate muscle and bone, trying not to bleed more than they can recover, trying not to wince too badly, trying to focus on the press of warm metal and calloused, bloody hand against hand, where they lie in the sand. Occasionally, a cloud passes overhead.

 

The silence is too much, however.

 

_Thinkest thou, Anri…._

 

She does not know how to ask. She cannot tell what happened to Shira, she does not know how long has passed, but she saw the carcass writhe upon her gruesome weapon, a thing of dark impaled upon the cross-guard, and she almost wonders if Shira was speaking to it as well as to them. Or else, a bitter echo of Gwyn’s judgement on both.

 

Her thoughts are cut short by a deep inhale, shallow breathing, and she turns to see damp sand and the dirt on Anri’s face streaked with tears.

 

_Ash, is this our fault?_

Is it? It must be, and yet it cannot be, for they’re the ones who usurped the flame, but it’d have died a natural death so long ago if it hadn’t been for the Lord of Sunlight’s tyranny and fear and loathing and bitter all-consuming _hatred,_ but _she_ bled on the Princess and _she_ freed the god-children and she agreed to return to the cathedral, and she piloted the body, she could have said no, she could have stopped, she could have, could have, could have-

 

- _I could have done more, if I’d been but stronger, if I’d seen the pilgrim, if I’d only had eyes in the back of my head, if I had but eyes, the foresight-_

-if she wasn’t so foolishly trusting, if she had any sort of training, any kind of insight, she could have seen through Yuria, she could have-

 

- _I could have-_

_We could have-_

_-_ done what?

 

 

The world would still be trapped in a cycle of rot and horror.

 

She breathes, shuddering, steadying herself as best she can. _Do you think this place is real, or just another illusion?_

Neither of them ask the other: Can we trust what we see?

 

_I think the better question is whether we can still leave. And what this is, besides world’s end._

For time is out of joint, more so than ever. World’s end it might be, but which? A far-distant future or the superimposed now?

 

_The never, I hope it’s the never, please, this feels like an unending nightmare._

 

***

 

They follow the trail of the shambling man, once they can stand upon their limbs once more, for there’s nothing else to do in the endless expanse of sand and dust and ruin.

 

Staggering forth, the two knights support each other as they make their way through the dunes, clinging to the warmth of their fellow as the wind howls. Anri stops, still unsteady in her movements, to wipe a streak of still-wet blood from her cheek, smearing sand into the cut in the effort, and frowns, bewildered.

 

_I-_

_Leave ‘t. I thank thee._

She reaches for Anri’s braid, half undone in places, the hair blood-damp and sandy, mussed with traces of swamp water in others, and moves to redo it.

 

Anri opens her mouth as if to protest, but stops mid-syllable, instead resting the side of her forehead against her own, breathing softly. She cards her fingers through the crusted-over strands, reworking it into something more-

 

-not more familiar, for they’ve spend most of their lives on the road thus, but perhaps _domestic_. Soft. More malleable, more comfortable, and less of a painful reminder.

 

_Did’st thou too feel as if Shira chastising us was as…_

 

_I was raised in Astora, to hear the gloried words of the Lord of Sunlight in everything, even when it was ruled by a different master. I heard his voice then, too, but it was like that of a hypocritical father, for he cared not for any of us. But I heard him echoed in all the halls, and thus echoed in every injustice I experienced._

_Thou think’st she spoke as him._

_It felt as much. And I doubt he’d hold much forgiveness in his heart for mankind, never mind us in particular._

She tightens the braid, re-binding the end with the worn piece of cord.

 

_I think people speak as themselves. But he ought to be begging forgiveness from us, as well as her._

_We took everything from her, inadvertently as it was. There’s no forgiveness for that._

_I won’t deny it. I’m tired of seeing people lose themselves, Anri. I’m so tired._

She does not say _friends,_ but they both know that’s what she means.

 

Beyond the dunes, beyond the bloody trail, pieces of an old crumbling wreck stand broken at odd angles. The remains of splintered thrones are littered with the dried husks of fragmented corpses – torn, rent, splintered. Half of a survivor lingers but a moment, crawling on her belly, dragging long white hair behind what remains of her torso before she goes still, her crushed metal crown toppling off her shriveled head onto a broken piece of stone with a muffled thump.

 

Just over the sandbar, there’s an audible crunching of bone.

 

A ragged man kneels, bent over the husk of a corpse. A rent cape, sun-bleached and torn, is draped over unkempt armor. He clings with one hand to a rusty headsman’s blade, steadying himself upon the hilt, as he tears into the cadaver beneath him with an unsteady fervor.

 

Yet he pauses in his ministrations at the sounds of footsteps, and as they halt in their approach, turns his head to glimpse his onlookers, revealing a beard matted with gore. Coarse grey hairs, interspersed with bits of too-dry flesh – bloodless, like flecks of dried meat, desiccated in this endless desert – sit beneath the familiar slave hood that conceals all but a crusted mouth and dull eyes, peeping curiously through the shadows of the fabric to stare at them.

 

_What, still here?_

 

His head is tilted, confused, like he’d never expected to see them again, never expected to see another person, like he’d been alone for-

 

Gael shambles to his feet, the bindings of his armor clacking together, cumbersome with dust and disrepair, as he extends a hand towards them, towards the Ashen One, reaching for her with his palm outstretched.

 

But he reaches for his blade with the other.

 

Anri looks to the body, to the gore-smeared Gael, to the cracked trail of carcasses they’d followed to this point. _Ash, this… the feast has begun._

 

She herself is still fixated on the broken throne behind the butchered corpse, the circle of them, upon the fallen crown, the pygmy begging for the withered, long-hollowed god-child, the blood of flame, the blood of dark, the blood, the blood, the _blood._

 

_So this is the full extent of Gwyn’s sins, then. This is what he hid._

_The pygmies, crawling among the wastes. The deserted desert, trails of blood, seeping into the sand. What he did to mankind. To us._

 

Gael, lips pursed, finally speaks with a voice so cracked and withered they both wager he has not used it in at least a full age.

 

_Hand it over. That thing – your Dark Soul._

For he is eating _theirs._

It is Anri, ever-strong, ever-light, dutiful to the end, who speaks. _Thou’ve forgotten thy purpose, Gael. We will fulfill it for thee, then._

He pauses, but a moment, and sighs wistfully, extending his wrist further.

 

_For my lady’s painting?_

Or… has he not? He cannot fully, he has not, then, but he was _eating them, he must have, Anri, we cannot simply just kill each other for this, he was **eating** them-_

_The blood ran dry._

_The blood ran dry, he needs the blood, but there was not enough soul left in this place-_

 

_Then why does he see it in us, Ash?_

 

And then, with a sudden motion, Gael flings the carcass off his blade and lunges towards the Ashen One.

 

Gael fights like a well-trained but vicious knight, like battle fodder, like _ash,_ with low sweeping strikes and lunging stabs and a ferocity that betrays a history of little regard for one’s survival. His footwork is impressive if off-kilter, and the cracking of stone betrays the strength of his strikes.

 

His blade is rusty, a less bygone style, and-

 

One Anri recognizes, as she dodges a stab that threatens to dent her shield entirely, only just rolling to the left in time. It’s rusty, and cracked at the edges, but it’s almost a certain match for one that belonged to an unsavory executioner in the cathedral.

 

She’d found the corpse with Horace what feels like an age ago.

 

Technically, it might have been.

 

But the blade was long gone.

 

Her Ash stuns him with the flat of her blade, and Anri catches him in the side with her straight sword, and it’s too much for Gael, and he coughs, clutching his chest, doubling over, collapsing to the sand as the two knights back away to breathe.

 

They watch as he stares at his sand-covered blade, breathing heavily, in that wet, damp way that suggests there’s something deeply wrong with a lung.

 

_Do we offer to deal the blow?_

Blood drips from the eyes of his mask, black as pitch. One drop, then two. Then three. A slow trickle. Gael moans: softly, inquisitively.

 

_Is… is this the blood?_

And for the first time since they’ve found this shell of the old man, he cracks the shadow of a grin, curling upwards towards sallow cheeks with a renewed determination, and with a sudden, harsh motion, Gael stabs the point of the greatsword into the sand, using it as leverage to lift his broken body back to stand at full height. The wounds they’d dealt him now smoke, like his eyes, with a deep red hue, like a rusty iron mist, finally bleeding, though in a way that’s unnerving rather than reassuring as it ought to be, and oh, even the hunch of his back, the boils there, motionless, begin bursting, churning as the cape itself begins writhing with a lifelike vigor, like two wet crimson wings, _burning-_

 

A swamp of humanity all of its own, for there are hints of faces within ‘t, roiling, seething, _screaming_.

Gael raises his sword, both hands held high. His might may be but only partially recovered, but they can see the will to fight renewed in the strength of his stance and his grip on the blade.

 

(But only then does Gael realize, as he feels the hole gnawing its way through his ribs, the blood coursing through his veins, that he had what he needed within himself. Now, it is too late for him, and he knows it. He feels his wrists tighten against his blade, and it is the last thing the man once known as Gael remembers, as the tide of dark overtakes him.

 

It is too late for him. He knows it.

 

He knows it.

 

For he is not scared.)

 

They cannot see his eyes any longer, couched as they are in the haze of blood.

 

As he lunges and strikes, tearing through the both of them, the momentum and the metamorphosis pulls what little inert fabric remains in his cape from his bashed-in chest plate, revealing a gaping wound across the middle.

 

_Gods, he shouldn’t be standing._ The cracked ribs, the deep, jagged puncture that’s surely caught a lung, no _wonder_ his breathing is so ragged. He should be dead, incapacitated at the very _least_ , resurrecting, _something, anything_.

Anri winces, as she quickly darts behind her shield to deflect a series of crossbow bolts before screaming across the battlefield. _He’s a slave knight! They’re meant for that, gods be damned._

But she stares through Gael, through the gaping wound in the chest, at her wife, darting around, and there’s a small curling darkness at the edges, that flickers slightly, only allowing Anri’s image to pass through it.

 

A black gaping hole in the flesh, unhealing.

 

A dark sigil.

 

_Did_ _he bind his own fucking blood to the Dark Soul?_ She swings for the sigil, trying to cut through it, trying to draw Anri’s attention to it, trying to figure out how to explain without having to-

 

Anri stares back at the protruding tip of her bloodied blade, the darkness surrounding it, understanding.

 

_The sigils you bear. Gael has a piece. We have the other, but he is far too hollow to go together._

 

Gael groans deeply, the sigil dripping in a smoky haze, and then explodes suddenly like Shira’s hammer in a burst of swarming souls, of bloody faces, shrieking and moaning and howling. She screams, her whole face burning with the brunt of the caustic blast as she reels from the impact, trying to focus through the smeared haze of red and black and visceral pain crawling across the nerves of her face so she can  _see_. In the distance, she can hear Anri’s sword against metal, the crack of bone.

 

Lightning too, begins to scream in the distance, clouds gathering overhead in a sudden desert storm.

 

The Lord of Sunlight, or whatever returned of his soul today to the flame that churns within them, appears to be _bitterly displeased._

 

Something darts past her cheek as a crack of electricity joins the groaning, the clanging of blades, the scraping impact of leather against damp sand, and she launches herself after the others. Gael spins and whirls, the heavy blows of his blade kicking up clouds of sand wherever it catches ground. He is relentless in his pursuit, all strength but not without the speed to back it up, taking bolts of lightning like a minor inconvenience, and even as pieces of flesh slough off, they only join the bloody swarm that pursue them.

 

But he is outnumbered, two to one, by a knight with a lucky blade and another with a tainted greatsword, sworn to kill those similarly afflicted.

 

She unmans Gael with a low-spinning slash, bringing him to his knees, giving Anri the opening to cut upward from behind, tearing through the wound, the sigil, the horrible bulging gash, all the way up to his neck, until he falls forward, sword forgotten, just reaching, reaching, _reaching_ , fingers twitching towards her throat, her face, no, towards her  _chest._

 

They shudder as the soul of Slave Knight Gael dissolves into ashes, returning to their own, panting, as they stand over the face-down body of the old man, bloody swords hanging limply by their sides.

 

The storm dissipates, slowly, as they catch their breath. The sky remains dark, but from the coalescence of the dark soul, or from all the kicked-up sand, they cannot truly say.

 

Shadowy wisps curl around their hands as the soul of Gael binds itself among their own, an icy rush of sovereignless souls and something darker, winding their way amongst the countless churning masses already gathered within the pair of them, bringing echoes of former recollections along with strength.

 

_He knew._

He knew he was no champion, not of ash nor of mortal man. He knew the soul would ruin him, he knew when he left he’d never come back, and he knew when he pointed the sword at the two of them-

 

- _he knew. He knew this would happen._

 

Anri stoops over the slumped body, pierced twice through, a seeping, bloody mess. The Ashen One watches as her wife shakily uncorks her flask and drinks deeply, draining it entirely, before gently lifting the corpse’s head and holding the glass rim to the empty sockets, still weeping a dark clotted liquid even still.

 

She moves to aid Anri, turning Gael onto his side, pulling her own estus flask from her belt pouch, dumping its contents and handing it over, soaked leather gloves scraping bloody gauntlets.

 

Anri holds the flask in position as she braces the corpse of Gael, pulling him upright to reveal a deep, rapidly scabbing wound, churning in a way that defies all attempts to see into the lesion’s very depths.

 

The blood of the dark soul fills the dirt-encrusted glass, drips onto the metal joints of Anri’s gauntlet, spills onto the leather of her own gloves where she props Gael’s ribs up with her palm. The scab crusts over as Anri corks the second flask, encasing the shredded scraps of red cloth covering Gael’s wounded chest with dry, cracked cicatrices, rapidly consuming him until one fractures at too heavy a touch, and it’s all they can do to pull back before the body itself crumbles into a pile of ash. They have only a bloody hood and a broken sword, now. Not even a body to bury.

 

She stares at Anri, where the knight kneels across the heap of sand and ash, bruised and blood-spattered, gauntlets stained dark with their work, the scar on her nose the only thing on her face pronounced in the light of what few stars peek through the dark night sky.

 

And she feels a churning, cold, deep in her gut, and walks off into the darkness, towards the broken thrones.

 

A wet hand grabs her by the elbow.

 

_Do not leave me thus… unattended, in the darkness. Do not… do not leave me._

She fears the dark, even still. She fears the dark, for she lost Horace in’t, she may lose herself, is that it? Does she not know, that she herself- for she was the one who did the deed, _what are they doing here, what have they done, what has she done-_

_-how could she leave Anri thus?_

A bloodstained gauntlet lies strewn amidst the spattered sands, Anri’s fingernails dig into the leather underside of her bracer, and she lets the force of it pull the heavy weight of her armored body to her knees, to _Anri._ Anri’s face is warm against her own, an utter mess, only marginally made cleaner by errant sweat smearing the mess of dirt and blood.

 

It’s just like the first time.

 

_Our burdens are considerably heavier._

 

Their duties may be lighter, but they carry souls of far greater weight.

 

She can feel the ridge of Anri’s scar scrape her skin as they breathe against each other, still harsh and unsteady from the battle adrenaline: sharp, hot puffs of air against her cheek, her jaw, but the reminder and Anri’s words and the deep unsettling _cold_ that’s taken root inside the both of them alongside the flame that’s been burning through their bloodstream since the first day she remembers, it all reminds her of one thing:

 

_My soul is black as pitch._

Anri stops beneath her ear, not looking her in the eye, but staring at the twin swords in the dirt. She can feel something hot and damp at the junction between her gambeson and her skin. Anri’s voice is surprisingly steady. _Thy soul is inexplicably intertwined with mine own. They are one. Thou cannot denigrate thy own without taking me with thee, right as thou art-_

_-do not-_

_-right as thou art to do so. Thy soul would’st always turn dark the day thou bound it to mine own._

(For she fell first, dragged kicking and screaming into the darkness. There was never any light after the abyssal depths of Carthus.)

_And yet…_

She pulls the gloves off in their entirety now, and reaches for Anri’s face where she’s buried it in her own hair. Anri’s jaw is soft where she cradles it, and Anri leans into the touch, averting her gaze, and she reaches a forefinger for Anri’s forehead as she opens her mouth to speak-

 

A bare, bloodied hand grabs her by the wrist with surprising force, holding her back, and Anri stares at her with thinly-pressed lips, barely-repressed tears, and a pained, challenging look.  

_…yet I cannot help but not regret what led me to be at thy side. For I…. without thee… I could not have-_

_-thou could’ve._

_Thou wert right. I was alone. I was so alone, Anri. I know not how I had the strength to go at it._

 

She cannot imagine waking alone again, forgetting and forgotten, to a dusty, blood-spattered coffin.

 

And she looks up to the sky, because darkness cannot be so foreboding when she once faced the flame with the same woman at her side, but-

 

-but it is not dark, for the stars watch them shudder in the sand, breathing heavy breaths as they kneel over strewn ashes and shed blood and knots of long-tangled emotions, and finally, _finally,_ she feels tension drain from a place deep inside her.

_And yet, look what we’ve done together._

***

She pulls for the cross-strap, rifling through layers of stained and faded blue-and-gold brocade fabric, the familiar tabard and surcoat, hoisting them over Anri’s head at such a pace that they catch her halfway, hooking on her half-removed pauldron before they’re thrown to the other gauntlet and Anri’s on her like a storm, unbuckling her belt, tugging off a boot as she kicks, desperate as she is to feel something on her skin other than metal and _blood_ and the burning ache where dark magic has battered them over and over and over these past days, weeks, who knows how _long_ they’ve been here, who knows _when_ they are-

 

She doesn’t want to think about it, and neither does Anri, who inhales sharply, almost a whimper, pulling the moisture from where her tunic’s torn just beneath her collarbone as Anri presses a damp cheek there, her lips, tugging the fabric down so her forehead fits snugly above her breast.

 

It starts simply enough, as it is wont to do. As it did, the first time, in Irithyll, in Londor, though far quicker, far more urgent. Bruised hands tracing tender still-forming scars, though the pair of them still shiver with adrenaline not yet faded, and Anri’s tabard is smeared with two faces’ worth of gore this time around.

 

She runs her hands along Anri’s ribs where Halflight’s phantom blade tore through her side, feeling the angry bruises there. Anri presses her lips along the web of marks on her shoulders, where the blast of Shira’s hammer caught her the worst, slotting a knee between her own as they cling to each other amidst the wastes, moving against each other with a frantic urgency, and it's desperate and unremitting and _wonderful._

 

-and Anri throws her head back and _groans_ , but quickly pulls her wrist back from twisted in hair to cover her face, and she won’t meet the Ashen One’s eyes as she grinds up into the friction.

 

_Anri._

It comes out too breathless, but the question is still there.

She moves to pull the arm down, but thinks better of it, and flips them, pulling Anri on top of her, so she’s the one lying in the bloody sand like a corpse, because she can’t bear to look at Anri like that, and _oh,_ she’s framed by _starlight_ now, and-

There are fingers tracing her abdomen, running across the muscles clenched there, old bitterly laced scar tissue, and she presses Anri's hands to her stomach.

 

They’re sticky, like her own were.

 

She comes with Anri’s name on her tongue and her face in her eyes, sobbing.

 

***

 

They lie there in the star-lit aftermath for some time together, scars bared.

 

It is easier to grow accustomed to wounds when they are inflicted out of a desire to cut deep. But a wound inflicted without intention to harm, whether it be so from lack of ill will or unwitting self-preservation, scars the soul as well as the body. Yet, like all scars, to carry on forth one must make their peace with them eventually.

 

And it is far easier to do so in the dark.

 

But eventually does not mean right now.  

 

So they lie there, two knights who felt themselves once hollow under inextricably bound fates, deep within the bowels of Carthus, and make their peace, not with their scars, or with the accompanying deaths, but with the Dark Soul they both now carry, and the fate of the last man who carried a piece of it.

 

Yet, whatever happens will surely happen to them together. For they both swore an oath, one to the other, that by their blood, no corruption – neither that of fire nor of dark – would take a single piece.

 

For blood, they’ve seen, carries great power. Blood was used to shackle the first man by the Lord of Sunlight.

 

And soon, if there is even a way to leave this place, blood would once again be used to free the rest of them.

 

***

 

Yorshka watches the smoke rise in thick tendrils, wafting up from the lower floors of the church like the curling hands of a dancer, dispersing in an indistinguishable mixture of snow flurries and ashes.

 

There is a clamor from the other side of the attic, glass against wood, and she turns suddenly, startled from her reverie, but her sister has not moved. She sits still as she was, her face rapt in unmarred concentration, scrutinizing the detailed lines of her canvas, one scaled hand delicately tracing etchings as she plans the particulars of her masterwork.

 

But the sound was not a stray vial of charcoal knocked asunder, jars of pigment hitting the floor, but instead a flask slammed upon a side table, followed by another displacing several brushes, which clattered amongst other mysterious objects that she yet does not know the purpose of, though she herself is learning to sketch.

 

Standing atop the entrance to the cramped room, beleaguered and bloodied, are her two battered blades, and she rushes forth to greet them properly with a barely-restrained curtsey.

 

The Ashen One bows to Yorshka, though averting her gaze, her face weary and half-wiped clean of ichor. They came quickly, it seems, for they did not bother making themselves presentable. She is warm at the thought, that they would care such to make sure they fulfilled their oath to the both of them – her sister, her _sister_ , how nice it is to have family again – to put that above accruing favor.

 

Anri of Astora bows to Yorshka, a quick bend of the hips, but turns to face her sister, face steeled, and simply says, _We have thy blood._

Her sister pauses, finally, and turns, tilting her head to appraise the flasks that sit on the table between them.

 

Yorshka can see it, though she thought it was pigment at first – the liquid kind, bottled in small stoppered pots on some of the shelves up here. This churns with a congealing thickness as the bottle is tilted, though it is far darker than the blood of men ( _or of gods,_ a voice whispers in the back of her mind, one she tries to tamp down, for she’s seen plenty of that spilled in the past age).

 

It reminds her of a slow-bubbling corruption, but it moves far more freely, and suddenly she feels like she’s going to be ill. But they will make something good of it, and she will be here to be certain of that.

 

Her sister thanks Anri and her Darkmoon Ash, and offers to name the painting for them.

 

But her knight stutters, and tells her she has no name.

 

_I see. We are much alike. Nevertheless, twill be a cold, dark, and very gentle place, and one day, it will make someone a goodly home. And then, I will name this painting “Ash,” after those who made it possible._

 

The knights look at each other, and her Darkmoon Blade shakes her head. Anri of Astora reaches into a pouch and pulls out a bloodstained scrap of fabric – a tattered red hood, timeworn and faded, dripping in the same dark pigment, and tosses it to her sister, who fumbles to catch it.

 

The blood of the dark soul drips onto the floor, onto her clothes.

 

_Name it for him, if you must. Then you’ll always wonder if it was worth so much death._

She did not have a chance to know the one her sister called Uncle. But she is tired of this painted world, she is tired of the soul-shaped one. She does not wish to watch another person mourn, see the moment when their eyes fill with tears that they blink away to the best of their ability, to see them love and lose in a single moment. 

 

She doesn't want to mourn again, herself.

 

Yorshka does not know her mother well, does not know what Velka thinks of most things other than what her sister has shared with her, but in that moment, as she watches her sister’s reticent face harden into determined lines, watches her grip the bloodied fabric with clenched, shaking fists, and slowly, _grimly, bitterly,_ nod-

 

-she thinks her brother would be proud.

 

***

 

The doors of the Sable Church slam open.

 

Yuria looks up from her papers to see her Lord returned, spouse quickly behind, moving with an alacrity that suggests they found what they were looking for, and more besides.

 

Yet as she opens her mouth to greet the pair, to ask how they fared on their journey, the Lord of Londor, still marching towards the main chapel, cuts her off mid breath.

 

_I require you for an audience._

_Did you-_

_I require you and your sister. Bring Orbeck, if you see him on your way. If not, we shall find him._

Within the central hall of the Sable Church, the Lords of Londor call forth a congregation. Liliane stands with bated breath, while Yuria tallies the present company with more intrigue than skepticism. Two former firekeepers sit amidst the pews, one watching with a comforting smile, the other listening curiously for the purpose of such a gathering. Oft to the side, a knight of Carim rests his arms on the pommel of his maul with apprehension appropriate to the severity of the invitation.

 

A scholar sprawls across a pew of his own, eagerly awaiting news of the journey, while a heretic is all quiet unease, nestled amongst the firekeepers with none of their excitement.

 

The occasional onlooker pauses to peer in, curious as to source of the commotion, fascinated by the prospect of overhearing news of the Lords’ journeys.

 

A nameless handmaiden lingers by the door, eager for tales of adventure.

 

They do not stop these eavesdroppers, for they do not care who overhears.

 

The Ashen One and Anri of Astora stand before the statue of Velka, weary of battles and gods and history and duty, and there is a resounding clatter echoing through the stone hall as a scrap of ring-marked metal is thrown to the floor.

 

Velka is the goddess of sin. The bitter truth of what the gods did to them will not remain hidden any longer. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hhhhh It's been a long ride, y'all. Only a brief epilogue left (and it WILL end on a happy note, I swear, but this is Dark Souls, and I feel disingenuous wiping away the traumatic reality of what many of the characters have gone through, so we had to put them Back Through the Wringer Here First). But it's been a real ride.
> 
> Other fun notes: when Sirris swore loyalty to the Ashen One, I figured she’d had to have known that the Dark Sun was dead somehow. I like the idea of her being privy, as a Darkmoon Blade, to the goings-on in the Darkmoon shrine, because she’d have known of the hidden entrance.
> 
> I'm really partial to the notion of Filianore as Gwyn's child with one of the pygmies, if not the Furtive Pygmy (who Kaathe never genders). She could be the daughter of night, daughter of man, a final attempt to circumvent fate by having a child with that which he hated, because he seemed well enough inclined to do the same with Velka, if we go with that theory for Gwyndolin. Plus, it would make sealing the souls of man SUPER easy. Just slap that bad boy on her and you're good to go.


End file.
